[section_title title=”Installation”]
Installation
Installing the M9i is a little more fiddly than the H5 Ultimate. The backplate doesn’t quite sit steadily against the back of the motherboard giving a bit of worry that you are not doing it correctly. The pins are also not pre-fitted to the backplate and tend to slip out again which is a bit annoying. The rest of the fitting process is pretty straightforward – attach the crossbars, a blob of goop and the cooler. The fan needs to be removed to tighten up one of the screws on the m9 and then put back in place so I’m not sure why it was fitted out of the box.
It’s not quite the ‘4 minute installation time’ that is advertised on the side of the box – at least not the first time you do it. I’m sure the next time will be easily within that barrier though as there’s nothing challenging or fiddly to the process.
As with the H5 Ultimate, Cryorig has provided a video to show the process:
Fast fitting aside I found that the height of my RAM heatsinks blocked around 15mm of the fan stopping airflow to a good proportion of that 90mm fan and heatsink. Temps seemed to suffer as well. When I first ran tests as I was getting delta temperatures of around 4.5ºC when idling and an uncomfortable 45ºC when the CPU was stressed with Prime 95. In an attempt to resolve this I rotated the cooler 90º. This fixed the airflow issue but had the unfortunate side effect of blocking the first DRAM socket. As my motherboard only has two RAM slots I was resigned to using just 8GB. Although this is ample for these tests, it’s something I would be unhappy about as an end user. Will this change improve those temperatures, though? They should, but time will tell.
