Conclusion
There you have it. A little known company making its mark on a very competitive industry, stealing the crown from Noctua and becoming king – at least for the AM3 platform. I can confidently say that this cooler has bags of potential and putting it onto a hot LGA 1366 Intel system will only show even further what this cooler is capable of!
However, while staying on the AMD platform, there is a serious issue. The black fins on either side of the cooler look great, but became a problem. Even on a well spaced out ATX mainboard (the Gigabyte 790FXT-UD5P), we were only able to use 1GB of RAM (of the 2x1GB set).
Danamics assures us that this issue will be fixed for AMD users with a new revision mounting bracket soon, and also confirms that this issue (in most cases) isn’t a problem on the Intel platform.
Another issue is the mounting orientation of the cooler. The Superleggera can only be mounted in a horizontal fashion. This means if you have a push/pull configuration of fans, the fans would be pushing air to the roof of the case and pulling air in from the graphics card below, which in turn will be sucking in the heat radiation from the hot PCB of the card(s). Not to mention some cases do not feature a top roof fan exhaust, or the cooler in push/pull may have space issues with the top mounted PSU.
Danamics says that the price will be 99EUROs and it will include either an Intel or AMD kit, no fans and of course the PowerBooster2. That may well put the retail price in UK stores at £80. The question is, would you pay £80 for this cooler? Its proved today to be the best cooler on the market, beating other top coolers like the Venomous X and our previous shootout cooler winner, the Noctua NH-D14, by 3° & 2°C respectively on a single high RPM fan on the overclocked load testing. The D14 retails at approx £70 with 2 fans. With the stock 2 fans, the D14 is 4°C behind the Superleggera. That said, £80 is a lot of money to be paying for an air CPU cooler, even if it is new technology. Add a £10 fan and £90 is pushing it when for an extra £20-30 or so, you can get yourself a decent budget water cooling kit that will beat it as seen in the results.
Danamics has done a lot to chop the price down and our hats go off to them for breaking into the CPU cooler market very well indeed and becoming our new champs & making this new technology accessible to some people more so than the previous coolers costing approx £160+. Danamics should be commended for bringing such an innovative product to market, let alone becoming the new king! It is rather heavy though, so beware when mounting and handling your case. It weighs 1180g without even fan(s) or the optional steel pressure mounting bracket! A quick google search will tell you that the term ‘Superleggera’ means “super light” in Italian – what were they thinking?!
Bottom line is we give LMX Superleggera a 9.0/10. It has the best performance for the AM3 platform at least, and provides the new technology at a much much cheaper price! Issues with the RAM spacing and cooler orientation do knock some points off but we hope this will be sorted out with a new revision in the future. All they need to do is mount the cooler is the vertical fashion and both problems will be solved. All in all, Danamics have given us a glimpse of the future of air cooling, and what a way to start!
Thanks
Thanks go out to Aria PC Technology for providing the contact for samples. Special thanks also goes out to Mads Nissen at Danamics for providing the sample to us and great feedback communication!
Posted in 
