The Xigmatek Aegir, SD128264, might look like any ordinary heat-pipe CPU cooler, but it is in fact a bit different, we'll take a look at why further down the article.

The box that the Aegir comes in is a gray box with a window on the side showing off the base of the CPU cooler. With the god Aegir on the front, which I probably should know more about as a Scandinavian, but unfortunately I don't ;)

However, Xigmatek seems to believe that the god will help their cooler with the cooling of a powerful CPU, so we'll take a look at how friendly they are to Aegir himself.

Inside the package we find some fastening brackets, a few different types of screws and bolts a wrench and some thermal paste almost looking like the previous Artic Silver tubes. We also get a manual together with some warranty notes.







As you can see we get some rubber straps for securing the fan to the heatsink which should help reduce vibrations. We also get a total of eight straps so that we can fasten two fans, one on each side.

Furthermore we also find a fan that is included, which is a bit semi-transparent smoke-like color with four LED's installed into the frame. The color of the LED's are white.




Finally we find the actual heatsink cooler, a gigantic cooler with a total of six heat-pipes running from the top, down to the base and then back to the top. With the difference from other coolers where they run in parallel, the Aegir routes them separately and evenly spaced up through the heatsink to further increase air-flow through the heatsink.

Four of the heat-pipes run below the aluminum base directly connected to the top of the CPU when installed and the other two heat-pipes run on the top of the aluminum base.






When looking at the base you see that the four heat-pipes that will be connected to the top side of the CPU are evenly flattened but they haven't really been polished. This will surely decrease the heat transfer together with the small but visible spacing between the aluminum plate and the heat-pipes.

Luckily though this void can be filled with thermal paste like the one included or if you prefer some other brand. With this kind of base it is also “easier” for the newcomers to the modding scene to apply thermal paste as you don't have think as much about the amount of paste you use, at least you don't have to worry if you take a little bit too much as it will fill the voids in the cooling base.

As always, too much is never good, but it sure makes it easier for the newcomers.

For reference we also include a thermal table for the different materials available for coolers and as usual copper is in second place after silver with aluminum at fourth place. Just like most other coolers available this seems to be a good combination and will hopefully give us a decent to very good cooling result.



The total weight of the heatsink itself is 670 gram, adding the weight of the fan it goes well over 700 grams. However, thanks to the metal mounting pieces for both Intel and AMD sockets there should be no problems with the installation and use of this cooler.

As said before, the heatsink is gigantic with its 130mm width, 66.4mm depth and 159mm in height.



The installation is quite straightforward, place the back-plate on the backside of your motherboard, push the long screws through and fasten them with the included bolts. On top of the bolts you then place the fastening bracket for your CPU, on the following picture we see the Intel bracket installed.




After that we place the cooler ontop of the CPU with it's own holder that you screw in place on the Intel bracket we already installed. It works just like that with the AMD as well, but with the other fastening bracket of course ;)

Finally some pictures of the cooler installed and with the LED fan running.





On next page we'll take a look at some testing results and also the conclusion of this review.