The look and performance of the XigmaTek Dark Knight is outstanding in both respects. The dark appearance with an almost sinister feel is quite awesome when compared to the usual flash that comes with copper and polished aluminum of most aftermarket coolers. This cooler would look awesome in just about any dark type system. The performance was also outstanding, both in temperature readings and in noise output. In many cases, when the CPU cooler performs as well as the Dark Knight did, usually it means that your system will end up sounding like it should be taxiing down the runway and awaiting take off. This was not the case at all with the XigmaTek S1283V Dark Knight. The excellent performance came under a pleasantly quiet system noise output level, which was far from what I had expected.