Xigmatek Dark Knight II Night Hawk Edition

The crew at PureOverclock has the Xigmatek Dark Knight II Night Hawk Edition strapped to the test bench today for a little review action. Here is a quote from the full review:

We are looking at a new CPU Cooler from Xigmatek. It’s called the Dark Knight II – Night Hawk Edition Cooler. It uses what they call “stealth” technology which basically means the heatsink has been ceramic coated to provide additional thermal dissipation. This is first of its kind technology we have seen used on a CPU Cooler, and today we will see how it stacks up to its more traditional competitors.

Click to expand...

What amazes me is that I've read maybe half a dozen reviews on this heatsink and NO ONE has made an effort to test this heatsink against the Gaia SD1283 with the same fan (for an apple-to-apples comparison). But they all repeat Xigmatek's marketing line and say that the ceramic coating helps thermal performance. Really? That's not objective and it's not good journalism.

But this is a problem that is affected most of the review sites nowadays. Most of them don't test apples-to-apples with the same fan. Why? Beats me, but some people like to use good fans with their heatsinks, so they don't care about the quality of a stock fan, and stock fans are a huge variable.