As I’ve already said, this heatsink is a beaut, there’s no denying that. It’s got it all – a shiny aluminum heatsink, shiny copper tubes, shiny tire air-valve style caps on the top, shiny sheets of aluminum (23 of ‘em!), and a big hole down the middle. What more do you need? From aesthetics alone, one might suspect that this heatsink is built for high performance, but is it fair to assume that based on looks alone? Nope. One thing’s for sure, though: it’s stylish as hell. I’m not sure what they were trying to go for with the shape of the aluminum sheets, but it’s kind of a mixture between an iron cross and the Green Lantern symbol. I like it.

I really like the design of the heatsink, aside from the looks of it, from an engineering standpoint. There is a copper block screwed down to a small aluminum heatsink, which have 12 (or six, depending on how you look at it) hollow copper pipes sandwiched in between them. Attached to all those copper tubes are 23 thin aluminum sheets, which look like they were soldered on. What they soldered them on with, I don’t know, but they’re attached firmly. Then, on the ends of each copper tube, there can be found little caps that look like what you would put on a tire air-valve. I’m not sure what the function of these little caps are, but I will admit, they add a nice bit of flare.

Sure, this thing makes a great paperweight, but that’s not what we got it for, so on to the installation. Out come the installation instructions. Surprisingly, the installation instructions have no engrish at all, it’s all proper English with proper punctuation. The pictures are really good, too. I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble installing this heatsink onto my AMD Athlon 64 (Socket 754). Well, I don’t know, actually. This thing IS a monster. One thing I’d like to note is that it’s not too heavy at all. From the sheer breadth of it, you’d think it would weigh quite a bit, but nope, it’s very reasonable. Let’s take a look at some pictures of the installation.

Take the protective cover off of the copper slug.

Attach the mounting bracket with the four provided screws, then put thermal grease on the CPU.

Clip it into place.

Now, I’d like to take the time to note how difficult this was for me to install. First of all, let me state that this heatsink would have been extremely simple to install if I took the motherboard out of my case first. Since I didn’t want to do that, it took me about 20min. Normally the retention clips on these type of socket mounts have a little piece of metal for you to push down on to get it into place. This one only had a little flange of metal on both sides. Also, I had to change which slot my RAM sits in, because it was hitting the copper tubing – this is unavoidable simply because of its size. Overall, the installation was more difficult than I had intended on, but not enough to sway me from buying this. I would suggest that you take your motherboard out if you’re going to install this heatsink, unless you’ve got a ridiculous amount of space to work around inside your case. Uninstallation, at least in my case, is completely impossible without taking out the motherboard. A little work on the retention/mounting clips would fix this right up. Here’s a picture of the inside of my case, after I took out the RAM. You can see that I had a reasonable amount of space to work in, so I shouldn’t have to blame my case size.

Installation of the fan onto the heatsink is supposed to be extremely straightforward – you hook the clips onto the fan, and then you wrap the clips around the notched part of the aluminum plates. This would work out well in theory, but there seems to be a slight issue between what the instructions say you’re supposed to do and what you’re actually supposed to do. Take a look at the pictures of the fan in the instructions, then take a look at the fan I got.

Check out where the clip is hooked out in their instructions.

Now, check out how you can’t possibly put a hook where they say to on this fan. I guess they intended for the fan to be mounted in a slightly different fashion originally.

Alright, I got it installed, so now I’m going to get some numbers from it with and without the fan attached.

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