XDream
An 80mm fan hidden under the fan guard tells you that it's got volume in mind. Nice hologram. The fan guard seems to accentuate the fan's sound. Taking it off (watch your fingers) seems to lessen the overall sound tone.
A conventional aluminium base with a large fan.
Yours truly had a little test before taking the photographs. The cooler arrives without the usual plastic covering on the bottom; strange. You can clearly see the rather large copper insert, and you may just be able to make out the rectangular profile of a Thorougbred XP2700 CPU. Again, this should demonstrate its physical size.
AMD motherboards have three lugs on each side of the ZIFF socket. I never understood why some coolers opted to use just the central lug for attaching the HSF on to the CPU. Cooler Master do the right thing by having the XDream cooler use all three available lugs. They've also had the foresight to make the holes larger than normal. Attaching the cooler is an extremely easy affair.
Here's the other side. Again, we have the same fixing. Here is where Cooler Master make an excursion from the norm. Usually, one has to fiddle around with a screwdriver to ensure that the cooler affixes correctly on to the lugs. AMD's specifications require a certain amount of force to be exerted on top of the CPU, so getting the clip in can be a tricky business. Here it's made simple. The clip is rotated at the top, allowing you to use your own thumb and fingers to do the tricky pressure work. There can, however, be potential problems on some motherboards with this fixing mechanism. If the orientation of your motherboard's ZIFF socket is rotated, the clip can often get in the way of the first two DDR banks. This happens to be the case on the popular ECS K75SA range of motherboards. Still, in terms of attachment, it's the best AMD cooler that I've used.
The cooler attaches to your power supply via the use of a 4-pin pass-through molex connector. A 3-pin wire is included for displaying the fan's RPM. The most interesting thing here is the pre-supplied rheobus. By turning the knob clockwise, you can alter the fan's speed from a palatable ~ 2750 RPM to a Delta-like ~ 4800 RPM. This gives one the option of defining their own noise-to-performance ratio. The wire is long enough to be taken to a spare PCI slot. A PCI slot plate is supplied for you to mount the rheobus in.
How about the SE version ?.
