As I mentioned, installing this cooler onto my motherboard involved removing the motherboard from its case.Next, the existing stock cooler had to be removed.The stock cooler was mounted using two plastic �pins�.To remove them, the best method I�ve found is to carefully pinch the end of the pin together and patiently work the pins loose by hand, rather than clipping the ends with wire cutters.Once the existing cooler is removed, two screws are inserted and secured with brass standoffs.Since my Northbridge chipset has a flip chip design instead of a ball grid array (BGA) design, a round gasket is installed to prevent crushing of the small chip.Notice that the cooler base seems quite oversized for this particular Northbridge chipset.
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After cleaning off the residual thermal paste and applying a fresh coat, the cooler is then installed on the chipset.This step involves loosening the two mounting clips, threading them through the screws, and securing the cooler using another set of standoffs.I found this step to be difficult.The fan itself gets in the way of accessing the mounting screws and the standoffs, and the cooler wants to shift/rotate as you try to get the clips in the proper orientation.
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Once the cooler was finally installed, I immediately became concerned about how close the cooler was to the adjacent PCI-E slot on my motherboard.Luckily, the video card cleared the cooler, but without much room to spare.While other motherboards might not have such a close layout, potential clearance issues are something to consider when purchasing this cooler.As I mentioned earlier, the rotating clip system also allows some flexibility that might solve clearance issues should they come up.
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Once powered, the cooler fan has a cool-looking blue LED (I admit I�m a sucker for LEDs).The fan runs rather quietly; the sounds of the CPU/PSU fan pretty much drowned out this smaller fan�s noise.
Idle temperatures were taken running Windows and full loads were taken while running SiSandra�s Burn-in Module.Temperatures (in degrees Celsius) were recorded with the fan connected and compared with the stock chipset cooler.Ambient temp was about 20C.
