http://www.legitreviews.com/reviews/xp120/
I was very curious about the use of nickel on the base of the heatsink. i've seen several forums where people have talked about lapping the base of the XP-120, to remove the nickel plating. Before I removed it myself for further testing I asked Chris Lee with thermalright about this.
" Nickle-plating the copper base is for better cosmetic appearance only. Heat conduction in this instance is not affected, or very minimal by 0,0001
Lapping can improve performance maybe by 1C maximum but it has be done RIGHT. For me I wouldn't do anything like that just to gain 1C."
I would also like to point out another benefit of the size of this heatsink and the usage of a 120mm fan. Because of its height and the area covered, the XP-120 also blows fresh air onto all the components surrounding the CPU. I think this could be extremely beneficial if you were able to add some heat sinks to some of those surrounding components, maybe some Microcool universal heatsinks??!!!
I asked Chris about the extra cooling the XP-120 provided the components surrounding it, evidently it was planned!
"Extra cooling for the memory or NB heatsink -- yes, we thought about this right in the beginning of product development. But honestly, we never carried out a test to actually find out the performance gain by this extra cooling."
After talking with Chris at Thermalright, it seems there was a problem on the assembly like with the wire fan retention clips, it was corrected before shipping, but somehow my sample slipped by. Thermalright was extremely quick to offer me a new set of clips.
After writing this article and talking to Chris, a few days later i recieved the correct wire clips as well as new piece of the vibration dampening material....All in all a great job yet again by Thermalright