Closer Look:
 

Out of the Box

Opened Package

The ICX-120HA2 CPU Cooler is a large towering cooler with aluminum fins cut in the shape of an X. It's actually an alright looking tower cooler because of that shape. There are a plenty of aluminum fins connected to the length of the four 8mm thick heat pipes that run up both sides of the cooler. All those fins and copper translate in to a lot of surface area for dissipating heat.

Silen-X Shape

The copper heat pipes are larger than previous generation coolers which were only 5mm at their time. At an 8mm, they are the most prominent component in the cooler's design. They don't run completely through the top 'X' aluminum fin like some coolers, but are capped off by the very top aluminum fin.

Nicely Shaped

Fins & More Fins

At the bottom, the 8mm pipes are machined and lapped to fit the flat aluminum base. They fit pretty well between the aluminum base material and don't feel as though they could ever be compromised. That flat heat pipe design means that they make direct contact with the CPU which should be a good thing for cooling performance. It's tough to speculate just how well this design will work.

Bottom

Side View

The base isn't perfectly polished, but is smooth enough that you can't quite feel any grooves on the copper or aluminum. The things you can slightly feel are the connections between the pipes and base. It's pretty minimal and hopefully make enough of a connection to each other that heat is properly transferred. The right amount of thermal paste can perhaps fill in nicely.

Direct Touch Heatpipes

Looking at the fan, you can see it's not your typical black 120mm fan. This is the Silenx IXtrema Pro Series 120mm Quiet Fan that offers 36 to 84 cfm (cubic feet of air a minute) and does so with a maximum 24dB noise rating. That's a whole lot of air moving through the CPU cooler with pretty minimal noise. Four years ago, you couldn't get that kind of performance without at least 35 to 50dB from a 120mm fan.

Front

Back

A cool thing about the fan is its color. It has almost a gun metal black tint with a pinch of silver thrown in to give it a metallic look. Rest assured, it is completely made of plastic and doesn't have any conductive properties. All things said, it really is a nice looking fan and it's LED free. It shouldn't be too reflective of a fan if that's what you're trying to avoid.

Front

Back

The fan mounts with two very simple wires.  The wires act as clips and do a sufficient job of holding plastic fans on easily enough. And you can mount the fan on either side of the cooler, or just mount two fans if you think you'll need the air flow. This method has been used on a few other coolers and has really seemed to take off as the method of choice.

Gun Metal Black

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