This week I installed the Xigmatek Dark Knight on my Intel i7 920. Before adding this aftermarket cooler my CPU was routinely reaching 70C and higher.
Construction
The Dark Knight CPU Cooler is very solid and makes for a rather heavy cpu cooler. It pushes the ATX specifications, leaving just enough room for me to close the side door on my Antec 300. I also like the design approach of exposing the heat pipes so they make direct contact with the CPU itself. The bottom surface of the cooler could be a little flatter to make a more solid contact with the processor itself, but a little thermal paste to fill in the nooks and crannies seemed to work out well.
Mounting Hardware
I was thoroughly impressed with the mounting mechanism for the Dark Knight on Intel boards. While I did have to remove the motherboard entirely to add the backplate, the payoff of being able to really tighten down the cooler with tension screws is tremendous. Using a corner-to-corner tightening technique, I was able to make an extremely solid heat transfer zone between the processor and the cooler.
Fan Mount
The hardware to mount the heatsink to the fan was simple and straightforward. However, the fan mounting, while clever, seems a bit fragile. I commend their efforts to make a vibration free mount, but I forsee issues if you ever have to remove the fan at any time like I did. The first time I booted up the PC, the temperature numbers were a bit higher than I was expecting and so I went to tighten the tension screws holding the heatsink to the board. Only two are accessible because the fan blocks the other two, so I had to try to remove the rubber feet from their mounting location with the board still in the case. With some patience and a ballpoint pen I was finally able to remove the lower fan mounts, but what a pain the butt. I saw the mounts stretching and knew my caveman hands were going to end up breaking one, but they all survived. I was able to tighten down the heatsink even more, for a better thermal connection, but when I reattached the fans, I only barely put the bottom rubber mounts into the slots.
*One other note, the fan is a PWM fan, which mean it should be variable. I could not however get the RPMs to drop below 2000 which leads me to believe it’s set to always run at that speed and since it’s quiet you would never notice. I should investigate my motherboard settings about this, since I have since flashed my Asus P6T and it could simply be a configuration issue.
Temperature Results
The graph below shows how the CPU temperature grew overtime with the stock Intel cooler in place. OCCT did an even greater number than Team Fortress 2 on the CPU, pushing it to 78C in less than five minutes before I got worried and canceled the test.
This final graph shows the CPU temperature over time with the Xigmatek Dark Knight fully tightened down. As you can see, the temperature difference is profound and for gaming my stability has greatly improved. One other note, around the five minute mark I lowered or turned off all fans I could to see how the Dark Knight would perform on its own. You can see that it climbed up a few degrees and when I turned the other fans back on it started dropping again.
Conclusions
Compared to the stock cooler provided by Intel, the Dark Knight is leaps and bounds better at removing heat from the most critical component of your PC. I would recommend this to anyone who needs to keep an LGA775 or LGA1366 mounted CPU cool.
