Installation:

If your installing and after market cooler on a system that is already built or on a system that has yet to be built the steps are very much the same. In my case I had already built my system within my case so I had to break the system down & pull the motherboard out to install the cooler properly. If your also adding a cooler to a pre-built system just know that 99% of all aftermarket coolers will force you to remove the motherboard from your system. You ask why? It is mostly because the aftermarket system require a special back plate to be installed so the cooler mounts properly.

Tools Needed:

Fingers
Phillips head screw driver
Thermal Compound (make sure your heat sink came with some)

Step 1:

Power down & unplug everything from your system & move it to a nice flat area you can use to work on.



Step 2:

Remove the cases side panel & expose all the inner glory of your system



Step 3:

Remove components & other items attached to your motherboard. This includes Graphics Cards, sound cards, SATA cables, USB cables, power cables.... everything. You will notice I left the Ram & CPU installed. In most cases I would recommend taking these items out as well. But if you feel comfortable leaving them in you can do that.



Images of case after I removed the mother & the motherboard outside the case.




Step 4:

Now you will want to remove your old heatsink & fan from your system. depending on the brand you might have different attachment methods. most AMD systems have a lever than can be switched back to loosen the heatsink and than a small amount of pressure is needed to unhook the metal clip from the plastic base. Most Intel systems will require you to turn 4 little plastic nobs to loosen the heatsink from the motherboard.

In all cases do not be shocked if the heat sink is plastered to the CPU. The thermal compound is pretty tough to pull apart so give it some small twisting motions.

Step 5:

Now you will need to wipe off the thermal compound from the CPU. I usually use tissue paper to get the bulk of the compound off and follow up with some cotton swabs & rubbing alcohol to get any residue off. If you don't have rubbing alcohol you can always use some....



Sauza Gold Tequila.. image courtesy of SMLAN 2006

Step 6:

This is where the directions for install will change slightly depending on what brand of heat sink you purchased. The best bet is to open the instructions that came with the heat sink and stat following those directions to the T.

Depending on your cooler you might want to think about how it will install. Will it be best to install the bracket than put the motherboard back in the case & than install the heatsink & fan(s)? Overall this is easy stuff, but you might find it very difficult to install the motherboard with the full heatsink & fan setup into the case. In my install I had just enough room to install the full setup outside the case and than move it back into the case with the install complete.

So overall mounting the hardware for this heatsink was very easy... I will provide some simple images below showing what was done.

Note: DO NOT FORGET TO PUT ON THE THERMAL COMPOUND I have read stories of this not being done... I would hate to see your system fry

Installing the back plate to the bottom of the Motherboard.


Installed mounting brackets


Attached heatsink to the mounting brackets (heat sink has thermal compound on it at this point)


A view of the mounting hardware with heatsink attached


Attached the Fans - make sure the flow of the fans is blowing the right way


The motherboard and system back in the case with the cooler... now time to clean up the wiring.


Overall the install took roughly 1 hour & 20 minutes mainly because I was taking pictures & doing other things. But as you can see the process isn't all that hard & can be done quickly.

Results:

After installing the new cooler I noticed that my system ran 10c cooler just with the system running idle & roughly 27C cooler under full loads. So instead of the system peaking at 79C when being OC'ed under full load, it now tips the 52C mark & never gets hotter.

But the real payoff happened once I started OC'ing the system. The PC is now purring at a nice 4GHz which is roughly a 50% increase in CPU power. So for a CPU that cost me $278 + a aftermarket cooling system at $65 has me sitting at $375 with all the shipping & tax. If I compare that with Intel's current top dog i7-975 Extreme running at 3.33GHz priced at $999.99 we saved $600+ while having a CPU running faster than the extreme. Now take in mind the i7 975 will get even better OC scores than our i7 920, but that is at a cost that is over $600 more than our setup.

Of course result will vary across the board based on many factors, but overall the purchase was well worth it.

Note: Definitions of passive, air & water cooling were modified from wiki entries.