Installation Tips
The cooler installation technique is described in great detail in the user’s manual, as I have already mentioned above. For Socket AM2 and Socket 754/939/950 mainboards the entire installation procedure consists of pushing the retention clip into the slits in the cooler base and locking it to the plastic bracket:
As you see, the cooler, namely the heatpipes in the base of its heatsink, to be more exact, are quite compact and do not get outside the bracket. Therefore, this cooler will not interfere with any electronic components on the mainboard or tall heatsinks of the other cooling systems employed on the board.
If the cooler is installed onto an LGA 775 mainboard, you will have to take it out of the system case first. You need to remove it from the case in order to fasten the retention bracket before installation:
Then you can install the cooler and fasten it to the mainboard with other clip-brackets included into the accessories bundle:
To install the cooler onto Socket 478 mainboards you will use the same clips as in the previous case, but they will hold on to the standard preinstalled plastic bracket on the board, so you won’t need to remove the mainboard from the system case. By the way, the retention clips of Gigabyte 3D Rocket II press the cooler very tightly to the CPU heatspreader, so the cooler won’t move or rotate when installed.
In addition I have to point out that Gigabyte’s own thermal grease is very thick and hence is very hard to spread evenly over the heatspreader surface. However, we have compared its conductivity with one of the leaders ?Arctic Silver 5, and we can admit that Gigabyte’s thermal grease is absolutely as good. It is definitely another point in favor of 3D Rocket II.
Let’s take a look at the installed Gigabyte 3D Rocket II:
This solution turned out to be one of the two tallest coolers we have tested in our lab so far. With the top plastic ring installed as well, it is as tall as another record-breaker ?Scythe Infinity. Its height is 160mm.
In the dark the cooler looks very impressive:
However, some of you may think that this bright light is too annoying, but it is a matter of taste.
Well, now that we have discussed the installation procedure there is one more thing we should dwell on before we proceed to the actual thermal tests.
