Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme CPU Cooler Review

Installation and Finished Product

The back plate is designed to not only be universal for brands of CPUs, but it is also designed to go on either way with clearances at both sides for the socket screws for this Intel board. There are Phillip's and Hex heads on the screws to get a bite when securing the risers on the other side.

Above the board, when you go to install the risers here, make sure the nylon washer is facing down to isolate the motherboard from the rest of the hardware up here.

With the risers secured and the top plate in place, you sink the short M3 screws in each riser until the plate is locked down. Now we need to apply thermal paste, the cross bar, and the cooler and we can get to testing.

After securing the cross bar with two more short M3 screws, I reset the fans onto the cooler and stepped back to see what room is taken over. You can clearly see the 8-pin EPS connector so that is good, but the memory has completely disappeared in this shot.

Looking at things a little closer, even with the fan clips pushed up as high as this design will allow, the fan frame is surrounding my second memory stick and it sits lower than the memory.

Before we continue around the board, I did try this splitter without the Molex plug having power and got no voltage to the fans. If you do plan to use this, be sure to plug in the Molex before you tidy up the wires so you can make sure it is not tucked away as you realize it later.

Back to the fans. You can really see from this angle what I meant about the fan surrounding the memory stick. This is for extremists, and most of them rarely run four RAM sticks for suicide runs, but for those looking for this to use as a daily driver, this is something to consider heavily prior to buying.

We know she is big, I like the color scheme, and as I look at it now just before testing, it's almost as if it has some sort of spell on me; I just can't stop looking at it!