Xigmatek AIO-S800DP

It's a huge and heavy and complex and possibly even dangerous heatsink mutation. We love the concept.

We’ve seen some interesting heatsinks in our time, but this one possible takes the cake, the plate and the candles as well.

Calling itself an all-in-one solution, the Xigmatek features a pump, aluminium radiator, 80mm 27.68 to 52.72cfm fan and coolant. Two power connectors are supplied – a three-pin for the coolant pump, and a four-pin for the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) fan. PWM is a good thing, because while the pump is reasonably quiet, at full speed the included fan is a little loud for comfort. The coolant is covered for two years – in fact there’s a sticker over the tank refill point that states that the warranty is void if it’s removed.

Like all good coolers it’s compatible with all the popular and not so popular sockets – 478, 775, 754, 939, 940 and AM2 are happily supported, with a reasonable custom mounting system that doesn’t cause too much fuss and fortunately doesn’t use Intel’s rubbish twist lock mechanism.

At 840g it boxes in the same weight division as the larger tower coolers such as the Scythe Infinity, Thermalright Ultra 120 and Tuniq Tower, so with the extra water-cooling to help it out you’d hope it’d have an edge over its competitors. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, even with the extra shiny smooth copper base included.

Attaching the Xigmatek to our heat generator Chernobyl and setting the dial to output a continuous 80W – as we have since the magazine’s inception to have comparable results – it registered 47°C in an ambient temperature of 29°C, which is reasonable – but the Thermalright Ultra 120 does 4° cooler without the benefit of water at all, with the significantly quieter Scythe 120mm fan attached. In fact even the older Zalman CNPS9500, which isn’t even a tower cooler does better, which doesn’t bode well for the Xigmatek’s prospects at appearing in users’ machines any time soon.

While it’s certainly exotic and performs okay, considering the weight we can’t see a reason why you’d go for the Xigmatek over a decent air-cooled tower HSF, or even proper water-cooling.