Photos Part Three: Mounts and Installation
The mounting setup is identical to the Frio OCK I reviewed some time ago, this means three things:
- It’s easy to install.
- It gives great mounting pressure.
- It may damage certain motherboards.
I’ll elaborate on #3 as we get further into this section.
First, here’s the mounting hardware:
There’s a plastic backplate, too. The long thin screws go through the backplate and then through the motherboard and are secured with the black thumbscrews. The plates are then put on the screws and attached with the silver thumbscrews. The two spring loaded screws get screwed to the cooler itself, and then attach it to the plates. It sounds more complicated than it is, really. If you’re on LGA2011 the thumbscrews with threads out both ends screw directly to the CPU retention bracket and the plates are attached to them instead. Below we see two angles of the spring loaded screws attached to the heatsink.
The difficulty arises when motherboard manufacturers place capacitors near the memory slots in the Zone of Exclusion around the CPU socket, if they place them right under the bracket’s screw hole and they use tall capacitors the spring loaded screw will run into them as it goes through the bracket. This cause damage to a capacitor on my Z68X-UD3, and would have done so on my Z77 Professional as well, had I not checked before installation.
There is a solution however, mount the cooler in a different direction! If you look at the pictures below you’ll see what I mean.
It’s a pretty close fit between the fans and the memory modules, but they made it. They fit under the cooler just fine.
How about some performance testing?
