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#766 - Cooler Master Eclipse Cooler |
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Written by Zach Jeffers
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Saturday, 16 December 2006 |
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Page 7 of 8
Installation:
For installation and testing of the Cooler Master Eclipse heat sink and fan, we used the following hardware:
Enclosure: Ultra
Aluminus (Noctua NF-S12 fans intake/exhaust)
Power Supply: Ultra
X-Connect X2 550watt
Processor: AMD 3800+ X2 (Socket AM2)
Motherboard: ECS
KA3 MVP
Memory: Crucial
Ballistix 2gig (2 x 1gig) DDR2 PC2-6400
Video: 2 x x1600Pro 256mb DDR2 in Crossfire
Storage: Seagate 7200.10 320 GB SATA2
Optical: Plextor PX-740UF PATA
Installation on our ECS KA3 MVP with AMD AM2 socket was fairly simple and straight forward. Simply place the retention arm through the cooler, place the cooler in the socket and attach the brackets. Like mentioned earlier, you can position the cooler in any four positions of your socket due to the mounting design of the Eclipse. Now when mounting the cooler in the position so that the 'shell' of the snail like cooler hangs upwards, the Eclipse cooler hangs a fare amount off of the board and might not fit in many cases including our Ultra Aluminus. This also goes for hanging over the memory. If your memory slots are close to the CPU socket, you more than likely will not be able to mount this cooler to hang over the memory modules. This was again the case with our test setup.
 
When mounting the Eclipse in either horizontal position to which you will have to run the retention arm with the fins, you will run into the same problem that we ran into with the Cooler Master Hyper TX heat sink. The cooler can easily slip during installation to not be centered on the cooler and not making full contact with the CPU. This is some what avoided when installing perpendicular with the fins as the point of the retention arm somewhat centers itself in the fins. This is not guaranteed and you will want to make sure to double check the centering of this cooler on your CPU before finalizing the installation.
Well, after trying all positions, we had to settle with the cooler hanging over our North Bridge heat sink. When hanging towards the back, we ran into the included I/O fan and exhaust case fan. When installing towards the right, we hit the PSU and when hanging over the memory, we had to move our memory modules to the third and fourth slots as the first and second slots were unusable.
 
Once installed in our only option, clearances were great. With the adjustable hood, we were able to point exhaust air from the Eclipse to flow over the North Bridge heat sink.
  
On either side of the cooler the cooler, for the most part, stays either inside or just over the edge of the socket bracket. On the memory side, hot air from the memory modules can be pulled from the modules into the Eclipse cooler and out.
 
Once installed in the case with all the components, you can see that the cooler comes fairly close to the video card. This could help cool any third part passive GPU coolers that wrap around to the back of the card.
 
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