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Xigmatek releases the Achilles HDT-1284 ... More silent cooling for the masses.

Introduction

Xigmatek is a German based company that specialise in thermal products for PCs, manufacturing products such as heatsink & fans, CPU coolers and power supplies. They were established in 2005 and have been building a name for themselves over the past year or so. Here's a little blurb taken from their website.

"XIGMATEK Co., Ltd. was established in 2005 with the aim of becoming one of the world leaders in the Thermal field. In XIGMATEK, the major members of management have many years experience in Thermal industry, PC, manufacturing and other applications. With our fruitful experience, we have full confidence that we can provide not only the best, reliable, environmental and performing Thermal/Cooling systems but excellent service also to fulfill global user’s demand."

 

Silent coolers used be expensive and once considered a luxury. However, with today's new cooling technologies, manufacturers are able to produce cooling solutions that's not only silent, but also offering good cooling performance.

In this review, our CPU3D review team takes a look at the Xigmatek's Achilles S1284 cooler. This cooler uses the same HDT (Heatpipe Direct Touch) as the Xigmatek's HDT-S1283 and the HDT-SD964. It features 4 thick copper heatpipes which are exposed at the base of the heatsink unit. This allows direct contact with the processor and gives maximum heat absorption. These heatpipes then fan out to a very large array of Aluminum fins, which is then cooled by an impressive ultra quiet 120mm fan which mounted using anti-vibration rubber bungs, and spins at a SILENT 800rpm when idle. In fact, it's still very quiet at full load spinning around 1500rpm when using the motherboard's pwm cpu fan header. The fan used on the cooler is a new design and is by far the best looking fan we have ever used. For this review I had the fan connected direct to a molex so it ran at full speed and still remained the quietest Xigmatek cooler we've reviewed in our labs to date..

           

We'll be testing this CPU cooler on our test rig which is comprised of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor (G0 stepping) on a Gigabyte GA-P35 DS3L motherboard. We also used 4Gb of OCZ Reaper X PC2-6400 DDR2 ram, an ATI 4850 and a OCZ 600w PSU. It'll be interesting to see how this CPU cooler can compete against the likes of the Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, Intel's standard stock cooler,  Xigmatek's HDT-S1283 and Xigmatek's HDT-S1283. 

OK let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Xigmatek Achilles S1284 CPU cooler.