First off, for those afraid to remove the motherboard from the system, turn back now. As is becoming commonplace with heatpipe coolers, the motherboard will have to be removed to allow the installation of the bracket that goes under the board. Since the technology works best when there is a good distance between the core and the top of the heatpipes, coolers tend to be sometimes heavy and often awkward as far as balance is concerned. That said, I have already removed the mainboard of the test system in preparation of the installation.
We will be working with an AMD based system for our testing. The socket above is the AMD Socket 939 and the test processor will be an Athlon FX-53. After the board is removed, you will want to get rid of the upper and lower portions of the socket brace that is normally used to attach your choice in cooling. Once that has been completed, go ahead and move to the back of the mainboard.
Above shows the bracket that is included with the cooler. Take note that it has foam on one side (shown above) to help protect the solder points of the motherboard and keep everything from shorting out. Though common sense, I will say it now: Turn the bracket over for proper mounting! Sorry, just felt it appropriate to make a note of that.
Above is what you should be looking at when you have placed the bracket in its proper place and are ready to begin mounting the heatsink. The holes are set for an industry standard motherboard, so as long as you are using a common board you will have no problems with the alignment of the mounting holes.
After making sure to properly apply a high-quality TIM, place the cooler atop the processor and secure the whole thing in place with the two included mounting screws. A proper installation will have the fan blowing through the heatsink and toward the rear exhaust fan of the enclosure. If the cooler comes to you with the fan pointing the wrong way (like happened to me), you simply unscrew the nuts and bolts that secure the two top mounting plates in place and switch them so they are properly aligned. Once everything was firmly tightened I could feel no movement at all of the cooler. It is a very secure manner of mounting the cooler, but I would still remove it before traveling to your next LAN party.
After the cooler is in place, you will have no issues with clearance. Since the heatpipe cooler sits high above the processor, even the memory modules and heatsinks used to cool capacitors and MOSFETS will easily fit under the cooler.
After the cooler is in place, you can attach the included cabling to the back of the monitoring unit. The unit shown above has the rail system installed that I use in this case (Antec Titan), so expect no issues regardless of how you mount 5.25” drives in your system. After I install the monitor in the system, I only have to attach the cabling to the cooler and a 12v Molex to the unit.
