The Mounting Mechanism & Installation:

For our test bed we will use the Intel mounting set.
There are several installation options on the backplate for the Intel and AMD sockets. The individual sockets can be selected by moving the Long screws from hole to hole.

We begin by placing the backplate on the bottom side of the motherboard and line it up with the holes according to your socket configuration.

The installation process for the cooler is fairly starlight forward. We will continue on by adding the long screws into the backplate. We turn the board right side up and pick out the knurled flat nuts.

We recommend using the included washers. The knurled flat nuts will help and ensure that the backplate and long screws remain in place while you move the motherboard around and into the case.

This is pretty much it for the bottom part. Let’s move on to the cooler. We now install the Multi socket mounting bracket to the heatsink. Attache and fasten the two small screws to secure the multi mounting bracket to the heatsink.

Done and done. Apply the thermal paste and we can now seat the cooler.

In the accessory package are also 4 thin metal spacers included. These can be used in conjunction with the thumbnuts to allow the springs to smoothly turn when pressure is applied through turning the thumbnuts. We skip this part for our test as well. The springs themselves have been flattened and turn smoothly enough for our purpose.

We recommend to screw each thumbnut in about 2-3 turns before tightening them down completely. Here are a couple of shots from the rear and front after the install.

Looks good so far. Although the SilenX EFZ-120HA5 is a rather slim cooler with a rather shallow depth we can make out some possible issue with larger memory modules. Adding the fan only confirms the concern. Granted that the Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3′s memory slots are located rather close to the CPU socket this should still be taken in consideration.

Looking from the front we can see that the fan clears our standard sized G.Skill memory module by a few of inches. So there is some wiggle room even for odd sized memory modules.

The chipset has a good amount of room to breath. Time to move on to prepping the fan. The fan is mounted and secured to the heatsink via 4 rubber pins. There are 4 additional pins included to enable the installation of a 2nd fan.

Insert the pin about halfway then pull the tip through until the pin locks.

The fan is now ready to be mounted onto the heatsink. We suggest to start with the bottom two rubber pins and then move on to the two rubber pins on the top. The pins slide into the groove on the heatsink and should be inserted about half way.

The finished install should look something like this.

Next: Tests, Tools and Methodology

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