Assembly and Installation
Installing this cooler is a simple and intuitive process whatever platform you have to deal with. If you mount your Zalman CNPS9700 LED on an LGA775 platform, you have to take the mainboard out of the system case to fasten the back-plate to its reverse side. Then you put the plastic mounting frame on the mainboard’s face side and attach it to the back-plate.
This photo also shows you Zalman’s new thermal interface, ZM-STG1 grease, on the CPU heat-spreader. Even using a special brush, I couldn’t apply it uniformly because it had a too thin, near liquid, consistence. Its efficiency is not very high, unfortunately, being 2°C inferior to the well-known Zalman CSL850 grease under peak load.
After you’ve installed the frame on the mainboard, you should secure the cooler on it. To do this, you have to take the special LGA775 clip, pass it through the pipes in the necessary direction and fasten on the frame with two screws. If the clip is perpendicular to the pipes, it is not easy to turn the screws around due to the enlarged dimensions of the cooler ?you have to tilt your screwdriver. Well, this is not that difficult as it seems if you’ve got some dexterity. But if you want to avoid this inconvenience, you can position the clip in parallel to the pipes.
As for installing the cooler on Socket AM2/754/939/940, you don’t have to take the mainboard out of the system case to fasten a back-plate to it. The cooler is secured on the socket’s own plastic retention frame. You need to use the appropriate clip for that:
Pass it through the pipes at the bottom of the cooler, attach the L-shaped cap and hitch it on the prongs of the plastic frame. You will require a flat screwdriver to install or remove the cooler because the pressure force is very strong.
Here is how the installed cooler looks like inside a system case:
There are several positions of the retention clips possible, so you can orient the cooler on every platform it supports in the way you want.
You can download the cooler installation guide from the official website (a 2.95MB PDF file).
