Installed

Xigmatek Aegir falls into the category of large coolers, the ones designed to give you significant overclocking headroom while being trouble-free air-coolers. When installed, the Aegir dwarfs every other component on the motherboard. While it's tall, it should fit in most PC cases that aren't slim.


As you can see, the Aegir is clearly designed to give you enough room to install a second "pull" fan. Even with a thick high-flow 120 mm fan installed, the Aegir does not crowd the VRM area of our GIGABYTE X58A-UD7. There's plenty of clearance with the longer VRM heatsink north of the CPU socket, as you will see in pictures below.


The GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 is a very crowded motherboard, its designers made lavish use of heatsinks to keep key components cool. The northbridge heatsink in particular was an area of concern before we installed the Aegir. After installation, though, we were relieved to see that Aegir's heatsink maintained a safe distance from the northbridge heatsink. The detachable Hybrid Silent Pipe northbridge heatsink assembly won't in any way obstruct the Xigmatek Aegir.


This is the key area where clearance is king. A badly designed cooler would deprive you of a memory slot, thereby making two other slots on the LGA1366 motherboard useless (if you want to properly populate every memory slot and retain a stable triple-channel configuration). The fan supplied with the Xigmatek Aegir hovers over the memory slot closest to the CPU socket, though thankfully, the fan is high enough to let a standard-height memory module be installed on that slot. The installation or removal of that module, however, might require you to detach the fan of the heatsink. Fancy memory modules with long heatsinks might give you clearance issues. You can try to tide over this by using a slim fan, such as the Scythe Slip-Stream Slim 120, which is only 12 mm thick.