Looking at the top of the cooler’s base, you can see that there is a round divot and thus why the top plate of the cooler’s base is thicker than the bottom plate. This divot is what the retention brackets hold on to, to keep the cooler centered. Below you can see how the different brackets attach to the cooler (in order: K8, 775, and AM2).

To install the Thermalright Ultra-120 cooler, you will, unfortunately, need to remove your motherboard and standard cooler retention bracket. As this cooler weighs 745 grams, the specialized retention brackets use their own back plates. We will be testing this cooler on our AM2 system, using an ECS mATX board and will proceed with the corresponding retention bracket. A small note is that the back plates provided do not hold them selves in the retention bracket holes, so when installing the cooler, you will need to hold the back plate up to the board. This can become very interesting if you do not have a motherboard with a flat underside. The last picture here shows a mock up of the retention bracket in place.

Installing a fan onto the Ultra-120 is as simple as placing the fan bracket’s ends into the top and bottom folds in the cooler’s fin folds. The first picture here shows the top of the bracket in place. These brackets have angles bent into the top and bottom corners. These are to be placed into the inner side of the mounting holes for the selected fan.

Now it just so happened that the Panflow fan that I had selected for this test, had a support column next to the mounting hole and would not allow the retention bracket to be placed correctly. Luckily I had a Dremel lying around and modification to the fan was simple and painless. For those that are curious, I used a drilling bit at high speed and simply cut into the support from the side. Though this is an additional step onto installing the cooler’s fan, it can easily be avoided by pre-selecting your fan accordingly. I do however call Thermalright on this as simple modification to the fan bracket design would bypass this problem.

Now, as I was going through the process of installing the fan, I realized that the installation of the fan before the installation of the cooler itself would hinder the ability to screw down the retention bracket. So, in advisement, do a mockup of the fan before the installation of the cooler to make sure that you will not run into any problems as I did with the fan’s retention bracket then install the cooler and finally the fan.

As you can see here in the first picture, the CPU is almost entirely covered by the cooler’s base. For the thermal interface during this test, I have selected to use the provided Thermalright branded thermal paste. A small bead of the white paste will result in a nice thin layer.

Once you have the Thermalright Ultra-120’s back plate installed and the cooler on top, place the retention bracket over the top of the base, just below the fins. The divot in the retention bracket will correspond with the divot in the cooler’s base and will line up over the back plate’s screw holes. Finger tighten the spring loaded retention screws through the bracket into the back plate. Once you have them screwed down as far as you can go with your fingers, and then proceed to tighten the screws in an “X” pattern until the screws meet their max insertion point.

Once you have the cooler tightened down, you can then attach the fan to the Ultra-120. Now since the cooler’s fan retention clips can mount on either side of the cooler, you can set the fan to push air through the cooler’s fins, or choose to mount the fan so that the air is pulled through the cooler’s fins. During the tests, I tried both and you will be able to see the results.

Once installed, the Thermalright Ultra-120 clears all components of our test motherboard and with its height-to-fins; I would suspect that the cooler would clear most motherboards’ components.

We installed the Ultra-120 into our Ultra Aluminus case. When installed, we had to remove the Aluminus’ CPU fan duct. The top Thermalright cooler stood only about 10mm away from the Plexiglas window.