Installation
I must say that this cooler, while not the worst, is no walk in the park to install. It seems to me that while be quiet! was trying to make a simple installation, they actually made it slightly difficult.
Getting all our parts together and multilingual instructions out, let’s begin!
There are not actually many steps to this install, and the first is inserting the main screws through the correct holes for our socket type (1155). Note here that unlike some designs, the screws are not held very tightly by the backplate and if tipped over will fall out.
With the screws in place insert them through the motherboard and carefully hold the bracket in place with one hand. With the other you will need to take the plastic “C profile spacers” and clip them onto the side of the screws as closely as you can to the motherboard. As well as being a spacer, these little “C” clips do the job of holding the backplate to the motherboard.
Now that the motherboard is prepped with the backplate you can attach the mounting brackets to the heat sink’s base. As you can see there are two that are very similar. Using the installation guide you will find that the one with only 1 hole on the end of the bracket is for 1155/56, the other is for 1366 and 775.
Using the small supplied screws securely attach the brackets to heat sink.
After applying a grain of rice amount of the included thermal compound to the CPU stand your case upright. Here is the tricky part. With one hand maneuver the cooler into place. It can be installed in any direction, as the mounting holes are evenly spaced. The four corners of the brackets lined up with the four screws coming through the motherboard. You will not likely be able to see all of the screws as this heatsink is very large and blocks your line of sight. Once you feel you’ve gotten the cooler lined up well, begin threading the screws into the brackets taking turns with each screw so that you tighten them evenly. Keep going until they won’t tighten anymore.
With the cooler attached firmly to the CPU there is only one more thing to do, attach the PWM plug to the CPU_FAN header on the motherboard.
With the cooler oriented as we have it above we have the largest amount of space between it and ram slots. However as you can see it is still hanging too far over for us to use our Corsair Vengance ram in the correct slot. Rather than run with a single DIMM installed we switched to some Samsung Green low profile 30 nm memory modules.
The next issue with this orientation was once installed we barely cleared our video card installed in the top PCI-E slot. The question here is whether the cooler will be able pull enough air in through this narrow slot.