Installation

The first step in attatching an aftermarket memory cooler with heatspreaders is to remove the original ones. The kit I am using for my hardware guinea pigs is a pair of 1gb sticks of OCZ Special OPS Urban Elite 6400. To take those off I simply slipped my trusty flat headed screwdriver under the edge and gave it a wiggle.

The next stage was to remove the nasty heat pad residue. Unfortunately the stock OCZ heatspreaders are held on with adhesive strips so that clips arn't necessary. Although this does relieve pressure on the modules it ends up leaving a large portion of the adhesive behind when you remove the spreaders. So it was out with the TIMClean (reviewed here) and kitchen roll and on with the scrubbing.

Having cleaned off the left over junk from my memory chips I proceeded to attatch the Thermalright (TR) supplied heatpads. TR supply your with 3 different heatpads per module: one wide, two thin. People with single sided modules should use the large heatpad on the side without the chips on and a thin on the one with, and those with double sided modules should us the thin pads on both sides.

With the heatpads properly in place they slip easily into the heatspreaders and you can widen or lessen the gap between the individual spreaders by gently bending the edges to give a tighter or looser fit if you wish.

With the modules installed correctly it was onto getting them into the motherboard. This was a little difficult due to the way I had the cooler facing; the heatpipes were brushing on the 8800GTS installed at the time. Taking the High Rise out and switching around the modules made it much easier and they installed without any more mishaps.

Next came the slightly more fiddly bit; installing the fan. First it was on with the mounting clips for it:

Then it was onto installing the fan itself (I chose a low spinning 80mm fan from noiseblocker) which with my trusty lengthy screwdriver was no problem. However, getting the fan into the right position to screw it in was quite difficult as I was caught between my large tower CPU cooler and the power cables for my hard drives. Those with large CPU coolers may find this a bit of a squeeze but it still should be possible to fit it.