INTRODUCTION

   A few days ago i happened to visit some of my all-time favorite forums online to see the hottest topics currently but while i was reading some of the latest and largest threads i noticed that the "war" between high-end CPU air cooler and AIO liquid CPU cooler owners still rages on with the first feeling especially happy that the AIO technology hasn't advanced much. Personally i never understood why people need to create "conflicts" for such meaningless things (take for example the typical NVIDIA VS AMD and Intel VS AMD ones we see all the time) since in the end we are all in the same boat and looking for the same thing, the best possible performance (for us) based on what we can afford. That being said today we can only cover one of those two "factions" since on our test bench we have the latest addition in the Archon line of CPU air coolers by Thermalright, the Archon IB-E X2.

   Thermalright is an elite design house that manufactures cooling products for computer components for the best quality and performance your money can buy. In 2002, AMD released its first generation Thunderbird CPU and since then we have been there every step of the way to counter high voltage and high heat with innovative design and highly acclaimed cooling solutions not only for AMD but for Intel as well. One of early well known solutions was the SK-6. With many positive and rave reviews under its belt Thermalright bolted to the top as the heat sink manufacturer mostly preferred by Overclockers and enthusiasts around the World. To this day, innovation never left our vocabulary as we keep coming up with leading edge designs staying ahead of the competition.

   The very first thing we did once we received the Archon IB-E X2 was to compare it with the Archon SB-E X2 model which we reviewed a while back and it doesn't really take long to see that it's shorter by 5mm (165.2mm vs 170.2mm) which means that Thermalright felt the SB-E X2 version was just too tall to fit in most cases and i don't really have a problem with their decision. The rest pretty much stays the same (including width, length and weight) so the Archon IB-E X2 features eight 6mm nickel plated all-copper heatpipes, C1100 pure-copper base and two TY-141 140mm mid-speed PWM fans in push and pull configuration. The real question is whether or not the new fin design is enough to place the shorter IB-E X2 model over the taller SB-E X2 model in our charts so let's move forward with our review.