Originally posted by: Syzygies
My Megahalems is in place:
Megahalems, installed with two fans using cable ties
The mounting system is best I've ever seen. However, the sag as the weight bent my motherboard was disconcerting. My last motherboard died for reasons unknown, it could have been similar strain from my TRUE.
Made me think, why can't the backplates have a long tail for leverage, to prevent this? Or why can't we drill extra standoffs for the cooler? In any case, I rigged a harness with #22 solid insulated wire and a cable tie, far easier than either of those ideas (the cable tie rachets nicely to just the right amount of lift) and now I'm happy.
This is in a Mountain Mods case. I used 1.5" 6-32 machine screws and nuts to secure my fans (8-40 also works, after trying this one cannot go back), and this gave a nice top anchor for the cooler harness.
Unlike the TRUE, the Megahalems doesn't come with any anti-vibration silicon strips to go between the cooler and the fan(s). Perhaps not necessary, but I have two kinds of fan silencers on hand. The FrozenCPU silencers don't extend beyond the width of the fan, so they just fit into place, as shown above:
FrozenCPU fan silencer
The Prolimatech thermal compound was a pleasure to use. I went with the xbit theory, thinnest possible film to even out surface without creating thickness. My Q6600 is lapped, so I was just "wetting" the surface; the stuff goes on arbitrarily thin.
I'm about to travel for a bit, so performance testing will have to wait.
(Yes, I know my fans are backwards, even the power supply. I don't use AC in the summer, and my office gets hot, so I'm exhausting all air out the top through a dryer hose, out a window. The Prolimatech is so I can still manage a mild overclock with 5V fans and this odd fan arrangement.)