Looking for a diffrent cooler. I currently have a Thermalright "Limited Edition" TRUE Black Ultra-120 eXtreme CPU Heatsink Rev C..and hate dealing with the spring loaded screws. So all I ask is not to recomend a cooler that has to use spring loaded screws. Budget is $50 USD but kight be able to strech that to about $70.
Pretty much any decent cooler comes with equipment to fit your board. My Cool-It Eco 120 is essentially the same product as the Corsair H50 and it's worked wonderfully on Socket AM2+, AM3, and LGA775. Basically any of the "all in one" water coolers like the Cool-It Eco series or the Corsair H series will be fine. Sam has a point in some ways but not in others. To install any of the coolers you are looking at, you need to remove the board from the case and install the cooler with a backplate, where the screws pass right through the board and screw into a separate piece of material. What Sam really means to say is that there's a bit more hassle with backplate coolers because you need to do extra to remove them. But I can agree that the spring clip bastards are not the best way either. If you plan to have this cooler running for the long-haul, you shouldn't be too badly bothered by the mounting method.
Well I do plan on it being a long term cooler, but you also have to consider the unpredictable such as a mobo dieing for whatever reason or even getting a bad mobo. Recently I got 2 bad mobos in a row. On top of that the third mobo refused to post if my gpu is in the top pci-e slot which meant alot of trouble shooting.
Yeah I think MSI bypass QC on a lot of their boards now. The designs themselves aren't so bad, but you stand a very high chance of getting a DOA as the faulty boards aren't checked at the factory. My point with the coolers was that while thermalright's spring-loaded screws are a pain, compared to other air coolers such as scythes, noctuas, and worst of the lot, zalmans, they are actually the lesser of numerous evils. Waterblocks will be a lot easier I suspect due to minimal weight being placed on the CPU socket.
Well I am starting to agree with you on the MSI factor. Honestly, I was planning on going Gigabyte for the new board because I found out MSI charged $35 for Mobo repair in the third year of warranty. At the rate technology advances these days a 3 year old mobo is not worth a whole lot more then that typically. However, Newegg had a rebate going on it bringing the cost under $100, seemed to good to pass up, but had I known the trouble I was facing, I would have probably preferred to spend a bit more. Anyways, how are the screws on the other brands any harder to work with?
It's not the screws, it's everything else about the installation. E.g. even well respected review sites were covered in cuts trying to install a Zalman CNPS10X - it didn't even cool properly because they couldn't get it to sit right...
I've been covered a a fair few cuts myself from several brands. Zalmans especially Surface area Personally have found the cooling performance to be exceptional though.
The Spire TherMax Eclipse II is an awesome piece of kit, I don't know if it will fit an 1155 but it will fit a 1156. Also, i can t tell you what you want to know about the fittings, but it is about 50-60 dollars for one. EDIT: I believe it is spring-loaded posts, and it was a pain to install now that I am thinking abt it. but it stays put.
1155 and 1156 coolers are interchangeable despite the difference in sockets the measurements for hsf mounts are exactly the same. As for the cooloer itself, at a glance, I am not sure it would offer much advantage over my current cooler which is very similar, but a bit less mas to it.
