Xtreme Gear HP-1216B Five Heatpipe Copper CPU Cooler Review

Installing the HP-1216B

The HP-1216B comes with everything needed to mount the cooler up to your favorite socket from the AMD or Intel. It uses a universal mounting system that allows it to mount up to all of the Intel LGA sockets, the AMD 754/939/940 sockets and the newer AM2 and AM3 sockets. Also included are rubber fan mounts for two 120mm fans, and a rheostat style fan controller.

First step is setting up the backing plate for you socket. For our testing I will be setting it up for the Intel LGA1366. The backing plate has a thin plastic insulator that covers the whole plate. You may have noticed the notches by the socket labels.

They are there to mate mounting screws. This prevents the screws from turning when attaching the HP-1216B to the motherboard.

They are held in place on the backing plate with jam nuts. There are also sticky back fiber washers to insulate the motherboard from the nuts.

With the backing plate on you then put on the springs and thumb nuts. The HP-1216B cleared all the motherboard components and was quite easy to install.

I pulled the cooler off to check some things. One, to see how much of the 5 pipes was on the CPU. The other was to make sure the thermal paste spread ok. The gaps of the HDT coolers suck up a fair amount of paste. From the imprint in the thermal paste you can see that only 3 of the five pipes are on the CPU.

Next, you need to install the fan using the rubber mounts. This was very easy, but I did notice that the hole spacing on the fan is slightly larger than the mounting channels in the cooler. The rubber mounts do a good job of centering the fan on the cooler.

Powered up the LED fan gives of a fair amount of light, but not an obnoxious level.