The mounting system on the GemenII is much the same as the Eclipse, though using a different plate arrangement. Instead of winged plates for mounting to LGA 775, the GemenII uses a square, one-piece mounting-plate that's secured to the cooler with four small screws.
There has been plenty of interest in the GemenII since we published our first look late last year. Many seemed to want this cooler for the 'wow' factor alone. But the GemenII is more than a pretty face and more than just a CPU cooler – it's marked as being a case cooler, too.
In the Antec 900 case, the GemenII was a real pain to work with. Its huge size and outlandish shape meant that the cooler is very hard to install and use in such a small chassis.
At CeBIT 2007, we had a chat with Cooler Master about the GemenII and there was no doubt, judging by how it was being displayed on the stand, that this is not a cooler intended for use in a compact case such as the Antec 900.
Each machine on the stand running this cooler was in a Cooler Master Stacker 830 case, offering about 50 per cent extra workspace inside than the Antec 900.
Fitment Time
The bare cooler on its own, with no fans, was attached to the motherboard in 400 seconds (6 minutes 40 seconds), coming 13th out of 27.
When we ran the active-cooling tests on the GemenII, we rebuilt it from scratch. The extra time taken to add the fans brought the total up to 611 seconds (10 minutes 11 seconds) and a placing of 20th out of 27.
