Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler Review

«« 1 2 3 4 5 6 7View All»»

Installation of the Frio CPU cooler was pretty straight forward.  However, installing the cooler according to the instructions for Intel sockets, we were concerned about the lack of insulation between the backing plate and the motherboard.  There are two sets of washers that come with the Frio, one set is the thin white nylon style, and the other is a thicker black pad style washer.  According to the instructions you are to use the thick black washers on the top side of the motherboard between the mounting bracket and the face of the motherboard.  Instead we opted to use the thin nylon washers there and utilize the black pad style washers on the back side to insulate the backing plate from the motherboard.  Not using the black pad style washers for the backing plate resulted in the backing plate itself to come uncomfortably close to touching the motherboard once tightened down.  An easy enough fix, and kudos to Thermaltake for providing the pieces necessary to appease our paranoia!

Once we decided on our preferred method of installation, the first thing was to attach the mounting brackets to the base of the cooler and place the washers over the studs.

Next we applied the thermal compound to the CPU, and positioned the Frio top side down.  Then we placed the motherboard in position over the mounting studs, installed the black pad style washers, and secured the cooler with the provided backing plate and nuts.

Once installed the the fit was terrific, and looked very nice indeed.  Because we installed the Frio on a mATX motherboard, there was not a lot of room between the memory and the cooler once installed.  Luckily this H55 platform motherboard requires dual channel memory to be installed in the 2nd and 4th dimm slots which allowed the cooler to fit.  We are also using G.SKill memory that has very tall heat spreaders, so installing the memory in the first dimm slot would not work had we been required to do so.  You will want to make sure that your dimm slots are either a good distance from the CPU socket area, or that your memory modules are not too tall should your motherboard require memory to be installed in the dimm slot closest to the CPU.  Any standard sized memory without heatsinks attached to the top of the heat spreaders will fit just fine in any dimm slot.

Here are a few pictures of the Frio installed with a single fan attached.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Slashdot
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
««»»