Fitting
Fitting the Hyper-6 isn't too difficult, the clips causing most of the problems I encountered. You replace your existing retention bracket, be it on a Pentium 4 or AMD64 motherboard, with the one supplied, prepare your processor with thermal compound, before fitting the heatsink.You place the heatsink on the processor while the motherboard is lying flat, since attaching near 1Kg of copper to a prone motherboard in a vertical position is asking for trouble, especially since the clips are so poor.
The clips attach to the four hooks on the side of the bracket. You need to install one, which invariably goes perfectly, push the high side of the heatsink down so it's resting on the processor correctly, then attempt to fit the second clip. It's here you run into difficulty, especially on AMD64 motherboards, since the height of the processor's heatspreader means you need excessive force on the second clip to get it to catch. Even then, the second clip is only half on the heatsink.
With a lot of effort and even more swearing, it's possible to attach it, but it's less than ideal. The definite low point of your Hyper-6 experience in this reviewer's eyes.
With that done, you can attach the fan. The fan only attaches one way, so there's no chance of confusing it and getting airflow wrong. Fan attached, you'll get something that looks like this.
Installed on a K8V for preliminary testing, you can clearly see the size of the Hyper-6. It's not size that's the most concern however, rather the weight of all that copper. It's simply too heavy for me to recommend you use it in a case where the motherboard will be vertical, the Hyper-6 then hanging out over your graphics card. 1Kg is too much to for you to put faith in the flimsy clips. Indeed, there's at least one documented report on the Internet from a Hyper-6 user who transported his PC to a LAN party, only to find the Hyper-6 had torn a bit of the socket PCB free before falling onto his graphics card, ripping that out of the slot.
If you're contemplating using a Hyper-6, don't move your PC while it's installed since Cooler Master won't replace your shiny graphics card and motherboard.
Onto the testing.
