[section_title title=”Installation”]
Installation
Upon inspection of the mounting kit, it was instantly recognisable and it was a very “I’ve seen this before!” sort of moment. The mounting kit is almost identical to that of the Alpenföhn coolers. The only thing that I can see which is different is the screw nuts that hold the brackets in place. It’s not necessarily a bad thing though as it is a genius bit of kit and it was a measure to mount the K2 Mount Doom that I reviewed a while ago. It led me to pay the Gamer Storm website a visit and to my surprise, they have a cooler that looks absolutely identical to the Mount Doom. Could Gamer Storm be a branch of Alpenföhn?
So to start off, as with every single cooler that requires a back plate of some description, you need to push four screws through the relevant holes in the back plate and slot the screws through the holes in the motherboard. Once that’s done, you then flip the motherboard over and install four plastic spacers, one on each screw, to get the cooler to sit at the correct level which is needed for a consistent level mount. After that, the two mounting brackets slot on. They can go either horizontally or vertically, the choice is yours. To finalise this part of the installation, secure the mounting brackets with four thumb screws and then you’re ready to move on to the next part of the installation.
This is where the fun begins. Due to the cooler’s design, it makes for a difficult installation. The pressure plate which screws into the mounting brackets is difficult to reach unless you have a long screw driver that is thin, in other words, without its plastic/rubber covers. It is doable with one that does have a shorter shaft but it is a bit trickier. Either way, it’s a simple matter of putting paste on the CPU and then putting the screws into their relevant holes in the mounting system, and then you’re done, almost.
Due to the fact that I obviously don’t have the smallest RAM in the world, it was inevitably going to cause a few issues with the testing of this cooler. Â As you can see from the image below, if I had all DIMMs populated, I would not be able to use this cooler. I’ve two images to demonstrate this. One is with the RAM in place, without a fan, and the other is with no RAM installed but it does have the fan.
The only way for me to use this configuration was for me to turn the cooler around. Although this poses absolutely no change to the end result, it’s worth noting that smaller RAM modules, low profile ones, are required in order to have the fan blowing the “correct” way.
