Old-School 'big air'

Back in the day (circa 2009 or so), this was a beast of a cooler, touted (and proven) as being capable of cooling fairly hot-running CPUs without a fan and offering stellar performance for the period with one or more fans installed. It also featured a fairly striking 'interleaved crescent' fin design and snazzy dark chrome finish. Unfortunately, all of these features were not without their costs - beyond the fairly high price tag, the big Xigmatek weighed well over a pound and a half, was incredibly bulky and had a mounting procedure that could charitably be described as 'tedious' - I freely admit to using a number of less-polite words during my own installation.

While the Thor's Hammer is still a pretty solid CPU cooler (my own 4.4GHz 2500K idles at 27-28C and hits 54C under load), it's also showing it's age compared to more current designs in the fairly fast-moving world of 'big air', trailing the current big boys in terms of performance, size and ease of installation. It's also still pretty pricey, all things considered. That said, nothing else looks quite like it, so it remains an interesting aesthetic choice with decent performance if you like your coolers big and shiny.