Photos Part Three: Installation
We’ll start off with the mounting kit:
Confused yet? There are a good number of parts, but the actual process is pretty straight forward. The bit in the lower right corner is a fan header splitter so your motherboard can power and PWM both fans off a single header. Very nice.
First you take the little metal nubs and put them in the bracket, the holes are clearly marked for which socket they’re for.
The white bits are the backing for double sided tape that will hold the bracket to the motherboard if you want it to. Personally I don’t, as I expect to be testing other coolers on this motherboard and could do without having to remove the tape.
Not using the stickytape makes installing the cooler trickier as you need to hold the backplate on, the pump in position and start a screw at the same time. Speaking of the screws, they’re next.
The black plastic screw holders snap onto the upper bracket in one of two positions, depending on whether you’re using the Performer on a 775/1155/1156 setup or a 1366/2011 setup. Again, they’re marked. Then you push the thumbscrews through, there is one set of screws for LGA2011 that screw directly into the mounts built into the CPU socket (nice!), and another set of screws for all other sockets. They aren’t marked, but it’s obvious and the instructions explain it. You can see the instructions for assembling the parts I just described in the picture above.
Once you have all that, the bracket clips to the pump and you’re ready to install!
The intake fan screws to the radiator with one set of long screws (and no washers), the other set of long screws (with the washers) is used to screw the radiator to the exhaust opening of the case, with the exhaust fan sandwiched in between.
When you’re done you should have something that looks like this:
