Initial Thoughts
At first glance, the Xigmatek packaging is done very nicely. It has a few pictures of the heatsink from various angles to let you know what you’re getting. No race cars or girls shooting guns here, I approve of this very much so. Aside from the pictures there are some technical specifications but nothing too fancy.
Opening up the package you are greeted to a 140mm fan.packaged very securely in foam around three sides. Taking the heatsink out you are greeted by the heatsink itself. It feels like Xigmatek did not skimp on build quality with the Prime. It is quite heavy and everything feels very solid.
Other bits in the box are various mounting pieces for both Intel and AMD, a little tube of Xigmatek thermal paste, and a user manual.Everything is secured very well as to make sure nothing is damaged through shipping. Xigmatek has done a very good job in that regard.
Closer Look
Closer up the Prime is easily has the best build quality of any other Xigmatek heatsink I have used before. It sure has come a long way since the days of the Original HDT heatsinks that had issues with fins coming loose.
The heatpipes are covered in nickel which prevents them from getting discolored over time. I have to say I really like the look of this heatsink, especially with the way that the fins curve inward at the center of the heatsink.
Looking at the base of this heatsink, the finish is very good. On this sample the base was extremely flat. It was neither Concave or Convex which is always a good sign. I would however liked it had Xigmatek chose to go for a design where the heatpipes are pressed together instead of having a small piece of metal between each pipe on the base. At times the metal pieces can create areas where there is ineffective cooling which would not be very good if a cpu core happened to be under that gap.
The fan included with the Prime is a rounded 140mm fan. It is very quiet when running at slower speeds, but also does not get very loud when running at full speed. It pushes a good amount of air as well at all ranges. Although, the static pressure (air pushing power more or less) is not exactly great. Luckily the Prime does not have extremely dense fins so this issue can be overlooked.
The thermal paste included with the Prime is not bad at all. While not quite as good as some of the top of the line pastes, it does do a good job. If you don’t have any other paste when buying the Prime you sure can use the included paste.
Mounting on the Prime is very good from my experience. The days of companies using crazy mounting mechanisms is finally over. Instead the actual mounting mechanism is installed before the actual heatsink is latched down to the processor.. This means that once the heatsink and paste are applied only a couple of screws need to be tightened in order to have a great mount. No more push pins, or other weird designs that were a pain in the butt to mount.
When it comes to the size of this heatsink I would suggest you check to see which space your particular motherboard uses for a PCIE slot. With my board, the upper most PCIE slot was blocked by this heatsink due to the extra width of it being a 140mm heatsink.
I was forced to mout it to blow upwards instead of side to side. Memory slots can also be blocked both ways depending on how you mount the heatsink. Those with low profile memory there is no need to worry, but taller memory modules will be blocked . Just keep that in mind when building your system.
