It's a bit hard to tell from the photos, but does the heatpipe-side of the cooler stay within the socket keepout area? This is an important consideration in particular for ITX boards, where the socket is often right up against the PCI-E slot.

I'm looking for an extremely low-profile solution for a custom build.. what does anyone reckon to removing the fan from the heatsink and using it as a close exhaust or intake?

Luke7
I'm looking for an extremely low-profile solution for a custom build.. what does anyone reckon to removing the fan from the heatsink and using it as a close exhaust or intake?

I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. Is this going to be a PC with no graphics card?

Luke7
… what does anyone reckon to removing the fan from the heatsink and using it as a close exhaust or intake?

I'm using a stock AMD heatsink with the fan removed in a 2u chassis, with a single 140mm intake fan blowing directly onto it, and that copes perfectly with a heavily loaded 45W TDP Athlon X3. As long as you've got the fan above the heatsink (or, frankly, really good airflow), it should work fine.

edzieba
It's a bit hard to tell from the photos, but does the heatpipe-side of the cooler stay within the socket keepout area? This is an important consideration in particular for ITX boards, where the socket is often right up against the PCI-E slot.

The dimensions there (pdf download) suggest it's a ~10mm shorter overhang compared to their Topflow, which I had to gently bend (~4mm?) to get clearance on my ASRock ITX. This looks like it has higher compatibility on that side of the cooler.

That ‘board (see my System dropdown <-left side) was hard to find a small, topdown cooler for, I wasn’t sure that Noctua's then-current lineup included one that would also be quiet enough for my liking/usage.

The Noctua site does have motherboard compatibility lists on their site, it might pay you to check against their dimensions to compare with the Shadow Rock LP.

Will have to measure up for my htpc (A8-7600).

it may fit as pictured but if not I guess there would be little harm in removing the heat spreaders from my ram and put this over them.

Here is the board:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4727#ov

Luke7
I'm looking for an extremely low-profile solution for a custom build.. what does anyone reckon to removing the fan from the heatsink and using it as a close exhaust or intake?

I tried that a few years ago, and it did not work.

What I was trying to do, was to use the PSU fan to draw air through a CPU cooler like this one (I used a silverstone cooler), and exhaust out of the case. Silverstone had that in their marketing materals for the cooler.

In practice it did not work, because the PSU fan only came on when the PSU started to get too hot, and as modern silent PSUs are designed to run hot, that hardly ever happens. It might have worked if I could have found a way to bypass the thermostat on the PSU fan so it always ran, or if I could have connected the PSU fan to the motherboard CPU fan headers instead, but I did not want to take my PSU apart, and mess with the dangerous high voltage capacitors inside.

As happens, I am looking to do another small form factor build in the next few months, and instead I am considering using a low end Corsair Hydro water-cooling kit, as I can mount the rad at a better location in the case, or even externally.

Your BIOS/UEFI might have a method of tweaking the PSU fan cut in point and speeds but it would only be advisable to even test that if the PSU fan, heatsink and intake all align so that you get a direct flow through/across the heatsink (that's for an exhaust PSU fan). Set it, reboot and return to the BIOS to check temps over a ~10 minute period before attempting to use Windows and monitoring tools there.

* Ensure you know what the max. temp is for your CPU first, some might be fine up to ~100C, others are way lower!

That actually looks really nice. I'm sure that it'd be alright with a decent airflow in a micro ATX case.

Probably best to upgrade its fan, there are plenty of better options that would make this cooler better, IMO.

Might just get this for my sister's micro ATX :D

Hmm those stock cooler temps in testing look alarmingly high and where did you mount the Fractal S24 radiator?? Upfont I presume.