Xigmatek Loki SD963

The Loki will also be tested on our Intel Core i7 platform.

• Intel Core i7 920 Quad Processor @ 2,67GHz 8MB
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, X58
• GeForce GTX 295, 1792MB
• 6 GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333MHz CL9
• 1x Western Digital WD6401AALS 650GB 7200rpm 32MB SATA2
• Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit

"ext." means that we've used an external temperature probe, "int" means we've read the values from the internal probe, that is inside the CPU itself, in this review with a program called Everest from a company called Lavalys.

Finally we have an external temperature sensor mounted on our northbridge on our motherboard to see the changes there. With water-cooling this changes as the natural airflow changes, however with air-cooling this shouldn't change too much depending on the CPU cooler of course. We started measuring the north-bridge chip earlier to have another reference point, so we're just continuing on the trend.

EXT temperatures are the ones that you can feel with your fingers and is therefore more easy to understand. How correct the internal probes are, I don't know, but I've included both figures just for comparison with other coolers in future reviews.

[tempstable]1[/tempstable]
[tempstable]2[/tempstable]
[tempstable]3[/tempstable]

As we can see the Xigmatek Loki runs hotter than the previous two Xigmatek coolers on all points and blends in between the [link=http://www.swemod.com/swemod/page/review/20101211_xigmatek_gaia_swemod/1/]Xigmatek Gaia[/link] and the [link=http://www.swemod.com/swemod/page/review/20101204_xigmatek_aegir_xigmatek/1/]Xigmatek Aegir[/link].

The Loki does not exceed 65 degrees Celcius which I believe is a good average temperature to aim below. It can easily handle higher loads without loosing performance.

There is not much difference to see between using one or two fans, but it sure helps. Also remember, the fans we use are controlled by our test motherboard by PWM techniques. When our motherboard feel that it needs more cooling, it simply sends a faster PWM signal to the fan and thus enabling a faster speed on the fan.

Therefore, using other fans may give other results.

On next page we'll take a look at my conclusion for this article.