Confused about cooler

Conum, the TS120 uses a plate that crosses over from 1 side to the other for mounting, so it only has 2 screws to tighten down, but the process still stays the same as you described. I use a dollop in the middle of the IHS around 5 mm or so in size with MX2. Since the base of the TS120 is slightly bowed, you won't have any problems using a little more than necessary, since it easily squishes the excess out of the way, tannor.

Hyper 212 is good for the price....but if u want something more efficient go with h80 or nhd14...noctua d14 does look crap...but that wasnt the reason why i dint buy it....its becoz it was freakin huge that it myt just break my mobo ...i went with the h80...it fits almost in any case with 185mm width with a 120mm fan on its back....i had to take alot of pain to put the radiator at the back....i did screw up a little harder and spoiled the screw hole....but it totally fits and does the job

muddocktor,

Just curious is it better to put these fan clips on before I put the heatsink on the cpu?

It's easier to put the clips on before installing the heatsink, but it's not impossible to put the clips on after the heatsink is installed inside the case. You just have to kind of guess where the lower holes are in the heatsink side to slip the clip into. But if possible, install the clips first, then mount the heatsink.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone especially muddocktor for the help!

I got my build up and running last night with the i5-3570k and the True Spirit 120

So far at idle I see the cores are 28-32, and at full load with Prime95 after 20 minutes or so the cores are ranging from 52-59 (the third core seems to run the hottest where it hit 59, the rest are around 52-56

Po678 said:

Hyper 212 is good for the price....but if u want something more efficient go with h80 or nhd14...noctua d14 does look crap...but that wasnt the reason why i dint buy it....its becoz it was freakin huge that it myt just break my mobo ...i went with the h80...it fits almost in any case with 185mm width with a 120mm fan on its back....i had to take alot of pain to put the radiator at the back....i did screw up a little harder and spoiled the screw hole....but it totally fits and does the job

Click to expand...

Noctua NH-D14 performance is within spitting distance of the H100 and without the reliabillity issues of a closed loop. On the Other hand, the Phanteks PH-TC14PE can be purchased for $79.99 (after rebate) which is cheaper than the NH-D14. Being a slightly improved knockoff of the Noctua, it performs a bit better too.

Glad to hear everything is going ok, tannor. Now tonight you can start overclocking and playing with your new setup. I got my 3770K in today and presently have it up to 4.5 under a custom loop. Max temp so far is 74 C with 55 minutes into a P95/Blend run, so it's not too bad so far. But I have a feeling that ramping up speed further is gonna bring the heat up fast, as I had to up the vcore to almost 1.2v so far.

Let us know how your OC goes

Yeah unfortunately have not had time to really play too much.

I finally did have the time though to completely resintall Win 7 along with chipset and all the right drivers and do it directly on my new SSD drive and make that my boot OS.

It flies now, I think from power on to desktop is about 7-9 seconds, did not time it.


What I really need to do is read some guides on how to overclock, I have never done it before, and don't know all the gotchas and where to start first. Hopefully this weekend will have a lot more time to play with it.

Well for starters if you don't really know how to overclock you should start with doing the auto overclock feature on your motherboard.

Then slowly dial back vcore until you get some instability then up the vcore 2 steps from there and test for 4-12HRs if its stable bump it down 1 notch and test again for 12-24HRs

If you are not stable go back to the one that was stable for 4-12HRs and do some more testing. This time run many different types of tests for long periods of time.

You can also do just what I said but kinda backwards. As do the auto then slowly bump up the clock until its slightly unstable then go back 2-3 steps and do stability testing.

The auto is usually going to get you somewhat close to a good OC but usually will have a decent amount of room for error.

It's your job to take the room for error out. By dialing back the vcore or dialing up the clock

Thanks for the tips.

I was curious are there any programs I can use to monitor my CPU temps while I am gaming without having to alt-tab? I know with GTX 680 I use evga precision and it shows my gpu temp and fan speed while in game or can log it.

Also any temp to see what the CPU goes to in terms of speeds? I understand this turbo boost can actually push my CPU to 3.8 right? I was just curious how I would know if it did that?

Ok i have a better understanding now. I use realtemp and have it run in background and can see the max temp.

So far I have just changed the multiplier to 43, so @ 4.3 it seems to be stable playing games with the default vcore which is set to auto, but seems to be 1.2v, which is the same at stocks.

Not sure if I should push it anymore