Maximum Air Cooling - the XP-120

Thermalright makes some of the world's best heatsinks.  Their best product at the time of this writing is the XP-120.  It is called the XP-120 because it was designed to accommodate a 120mm fan.  It is large yet lightweight, consisting of FIVE heatpipes and a multitude of fins, all of which are soldered firmly onto a finely polished base.  MSRP is US$50 each.  Its not cheap, but the XP-120 is worth every greenback.

The XP-120 comes in a plain but sturdy brown box with "Thermalright, Inc." proudly silkscreened across the top.  Each XP120 includes an installation guide, a mounting base, Thermalright's own heatsink compound, and fan retention clips.

Below are more shots of the XP-120 next to three familiar processors - a Socket-A Athlon, a Xeon, and an Opteron.

Mounting the XP-120 on a mobo may require using the supplied heatsink retention bracket.  As you can see below, the bracket is interfering with a large SMT electrolytic cap:

Removing a bit of material from the bracket allows everything to fit nicely:

Once the brackets are properly seated, the question is - will the XP-120s fit on the DK8N?  The answer is a Marv Albert-like YESS!!!  As shown in the images below, the XP-120s fit beautifully, providing enough clearance above the DIMMs, while providing airflow to cool them as well. 

The rightmost photo above clearly shows the heatpipes of the XP-120 on the left extending above the motherboard's property line.  This overhang was measured to be about 0.75 inches.  Some PC cases have the power supply sitting very close to the top of the motherboard, posing an potential interference problem with left hand XP-120.  Our test case is Beantech's BT-90 full-tower clear acrylic case.  Luckily, the BT-90 is constructed with its power supply just far enough from the motherboard plane to clear the XP-120's wayward heatpipes: