Noctua NC-U6 Heatpipe Chipset Cooler
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Installation:
The first step is to determine which mounting clip to use and fasten it to the cooler. The image below shows that you need to have a long, thin handled Phillips head screw driver in order to install your mounting bracket of choice. The fins on the cooler have holes in the center, and as pictured you need to be able to get your screw driver in there. Most of my tools were too thick or too short to work, so I had to get out my precision screw driver set. Make sure you have the right tools for the job for this installation!
With the cooler fitted with a mounting bracket you still have some work to do in order to get it ready for installation. You can leave the screw a bit loose so it can pivot (remember to tighten it up later), and each of the two legs that extended from the cooler can also pivot. This movement allows you to determine the orientation of the cooler relative to the mounting clips / holes on the motherboard, and it allows you to adjust the effective lengths of the legs in order to reach points at different distances from the cooler.
With everything sized up, it is time to install the NC-U6. The core components of the system used to test the chipset cooler consisted of an Intel Pentium D840 (3.2 GHz Dual-Core) CPU, ECS Elitegroup RC410L/800-M Pentium 4 mATX Motherboard, Cooler Master Hyper TX Socket 775 CPU Cooler [review], and OCZ 1GB (2x 512MB) EL Gold Edition GX XTC PC2-5400 DDR2 Memory [review].
The below left image shows the original configuration, where a small aluminum heatsink can be seen on the motherboard's chipset. The below right image shows the stock cooler removed, revealing the bare ATI motherboard chipset.
The images below show different views of the Noctua NC-U6 Heatpipe Chipset Cooler installed. The whole process was rather simple, and the only issue I had was finding a suitable orientation so everything could coexist on the motherboard.
Although the Cooler Master Hyper TX CPU cooler is one of the smaller heatpipe coolers I have used recently, it does come in very close proximity to the NC-U6 on this motherboard. It is a fairly tight fit between the PCI Express slot and the CPU cooler in this arrangement, in part due to the compact nature of the motherboard, and also in part due to a limitation in the orientation angles available. The NC-U6 has a range of about 120 degrees, and that just wasn't enough for me to get the cooler to be parallel to the PCI Express slot, which would have been my preferred setup.
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