Installation Tips

Two fastening mechanisms are used to mount it on the CPU:

You don’t have to take the mainboard out of the system case to do that, yet I think this is desirable in order to establish proper contact between the cooler and the CPU heat-spreader. It’s not handy to insert the plastic locks on LGA775 or hitch the clip on K8 platforms when you are doing this inside the system case. Sometimes you don’t even know if the cooler is installed properly or not. So, I recommend to take the mainboard out and do everything in a neat and tidy manner.

The cooler presses hard upon the mainboard which bends under it so heavily that the aluminum heatsink on the power circuit elements of the ASUS P5K Deluxe mainboard touched only two of those elements and I had to insert additional thermal pads in there.

As opposed to the Enzotech Ultra-X, the pipes of the new cooler from Thermalright go out of the base and rise up suddenly. The near-socket elements can’t get in their way. One orientation variant of the cooler was not possible in my system, but only due to the high heatsinks on the memory sticks. I could freely choose from among the other three variants.

The included manual doesn’t indicate the preferable orientation. I installed the cooler in such a way that the ends of the heat pipes were directed upwards.

The recommended price of the Thermalright SI-128 heatsink is $50, and you have to buy a fan to it. Thermalright has also announced a modernized version of the SI-128 with the SE suffix. The new cooler has perforated heatsink ribs. According to the manufacturer, the improved SI-128SE offers less resistance to the airflow from the fan, which allows using slower and quieter fans without losing anything in terms of cooling performance.