Ive recently built a new rig and included the awesome titan fenrir to cool the cpu. While it does this very well i cant help but feel ive done something wrong. It came with the correct bracket for my 1156 socket but the only way i could mount it was so that the fan is right next to the back of the graphics card and blowing air through the heatsink up to the top of the case where luckily ive got an antec big boy fan. Now is this gonna provide the best cooling in this config? Ive looked on Bit Tech's review of the fenrir to see how its orientated in their pics but when it came out they tried it on a 1366 socket that blew the air out the back of the case. What did i do wrong!!?
I've helped build two systems for friends recently using the fenrir. You would usually get slightly performance with the fan blowing through the heatsink from the front to the back of the case, especially if the graphics card is going to be very close the fan if mounted to blow the air vertically. We managed this on the i7 1366 socket but on the 1156 the fan was pushing too much on the memory even though it was in the second slot. Most of the large tower coolers overhang the first memory slot but on smaller boards and if your memory has large heatsinks sometimes you may have trouble with the 2nd slot. If the memory has small heatsinks like on the corsair xms3 you may be able to slide the fan up enough to clear it without impacting much on cooling. If the fan is not right on top of the graphics card you may be ok, say 2 slots width space. Though if the system is not overclocked it should run within limits and I woudl try running a cpu stress test like prime95 and usign core temp to monitor the cpu temperature if it goes too high then you may need to try reorientating the heatsink. I would be surprised if it went so high as to cause issues but it may prevent much of an overclock or give you problems if your gpu and cpu were being used heavily at the same.
the trouble is that i wanted to orientate the cooler so that it sucks air over the ram and blows it out through the exhaust fan at the back of the case but the 1156 bracket does not let me do this as far as i know. Ive only got a moderate overclock on my i3 530 so it isn't realy an issue, it just bugs me thats all! There is only about an inch between the fan housing and my 5770 in the pci socket but i was thinking if 2 graphics cards can run touching eachother in a crossfirce or sli rig then an inch must be loads of room.
I would say that an inch probably is enough room and if your not getting temp problems then thats ok, if you have the integrated graphics disabled it should reduce the heat aswell. The mounting should allow you to position the heatsink facing any edge of the motherboard as the moutnig holes in the motherboard are in a square pattern so you can just turn the heatsink round 90 degrees. The problem would be the overhang of the fan. Though if you've got ram with just heatspreaders and not fancy looking heatisnks it should be able to fit underneath the fan.
