So, here is my Gigabyte MicroATX board. My XP-120 showed up today so I can finally see if this cooler is going to fit my board or not... Here goes
First I need to replace the standard AM2 connecter with the XP-120 adapter so that it will be able to mount on this motherboard. The first thing I need to do is remove the stock mounting frame. Ill start by pushing the middle pin on each connector from the bottom of the motherboard. Sorry for the crappy phone pics.
With a small flathead screwdriver, these pins pop right out leaving just a second larger white pin behind. the mounting plate comes right off.
With a little pinching and force, the second larger pins come out of the holes too. you can see both pins in this picture.
I've run into my first problem!!
It seems the holes in the default gigabyte mounting frame and the AM2 adapter for the xp-120 have different sized holes! The Pushpins from the default frame dont fit into the holes of the second adapter, and that adapter didnt come with any screws! Here is a picture showing the difference in the hole sizes, looks like gigabyte is using a concave larger circle to fit the pushpins, while the other just has round smaller holes.
I decide this isnt anything a little drilling can't fix!
Now I have drilled out the holes, This was actually kindof hard to get the right size, At first it looked like it was big enough, but the pushpins wouldnt fit right, so I had to drill some more (after this picture was taken). But I finally got the holes drilled sufficiently.
And here is the AM2 adapter with the pushpins installed!
I still think that my holes were perhaps a little too small, because installing the pushpins onto the motherboard was pretty tight, but I think it made it go on more securely than the stock adapter, and it definitely is on there good and tight and wont be coming off anytime soon. It looks good so far!
Here is my testfit of the XP-120, it only fit in one direction, with the heatpipes towards the memory. Otherwise it barely collided with the capacitors that you can see there on the right. The heatpipes look like they are blocking the memory more than they really are. It actually is only overlapping on the very first DDR2 slot. A stick of memory could almost still fit there, but not quite. Luckily the manual says that you can install your two sticks of memory into the far slots and still run it in dual channel. so this isnt a problem. LOOKS LIKE THE XP-120 is going to work!
Here is my new Brisbane chip! Its time to mount it!
Can't see in the pic very well, but here is the chip with zalman stg-1 on it, which is supposed to be slightly better than AS5. I used the last little bit of it on this application. There sure isnt much in that little bottle. I only got about 5 CPU installs out of it. and I lay it on thin.
Here is the XP-120 installed with the memory in place. Awesome, everything is going pretty well so far!
Here is a shot of the motherboard mounted in the NSK2400. (I am still waiting for my Nexus fans in the mail, and a few other bits and pieces before I can finish this up.)
Now looking at my system at this point.... I was thinking I could probably run the XP-120 passively, but after seeing the cooler firsthand, its not nearly as big and heavy as I imagined, and looking at the fin design, it seems like passive cooling may be impossible, with this case, as it seems not much airflow is going to get to pass through the fins since they are vertical not horizontal, which seems to block airflow from getting to the center of the cooler. I guess I will just have to try and see.
I am slightly worried because this case is meant to suck in air from the PCI slots, but I am going to be using all but one slot so it is going to be covered up for the most part. Has anybody with a similar case setup had any issues?
Hope you enjoyed this post. Ill post more tomorrow once I make more headway.