WARNING! Asus Star Ice incompatible with Asus A8V Deluxe & Corsair Twin-X Pro

[GingerNinja.net]

To Whom It May Concern

Recently purchased the folllowing items of kit:

• Asus Star Ice CPU Cooler
• 1GB Matched Pair Corsair Twin-X Pro 2-2-2-5 Memory

Went to install it all this morning and after painstakingly going through the rubbish Star Ice manual to construct the retention mechanism, discovered that with the cooler's fan set to blow out the back, you cannot ACTUALLY use the fan when using dual-channel memory.

Why?

Well, the bottom of the fan is sitting on top of the first bank of memory.

Unimpressed? You betcha. My choices are now:

• Install the Star Ice so that it is blowing up towards my PSU (not recommended!)
• Use the default cooler and sell the Star Ice on here or via E-bay

I think I will go and cry in a corner as well.....

[Steve]

Isn't that more of a motherboard layout issue?

A lot of big coolers can have mounting issues on certain motherboards/graphics cards.

[GingerNinja.net]

Isn't that more of a motherboard layout issue?

A lot of big coolers can have mounting issues on certain motherboards/graphics cards.

Yes, but don't you think that an ASUS cooler would conceivably sit happily on an Asus board?????

[Steve]

A fair point, but if the cooler was designed after the motherboard, then perhaps not.

[DR]

Please can you post some pictures?

[GingerNinja.net]

A fair point, but if the cooler was designed after the motherboard, then perhaps not.

That's even worse.......

Asus Designer 1: Hmm, let's make a really cool CPU Cooler.
Asus Designer 2: Yeah, but let's make sure that it sits on the A8V board as that is going to be very OC friendly with revision 2.
Asus Designer 1: Nah, feck that. Let's not bother.

*sigh*

Someone has recommended the Thermalright XP-120, but I don't know if this will give any better performance or just have the same issues.

[GingerNinja.net]

Please can you post some pictures?

Damn, I've just boxed it all back up.

Tell you what, I don't mind unpacking it all and taking a photo, but anything I post will not show the correct bracket as I have already taken it apart and reboxed it all, but recreating it with the fan resting on the CPU shouldn't be a problem.....



This is an aerial shot of the board. As you can see the angle looks wrong and although it isn't clear, it is resting on my lovely memory...



This is a close up - yes, that is INDEED the CPU heatspreader you can see. When assembled the Asus Star Ice sits directly on top with only the pressure of two mounting screws keeping it in place.

Hope this helps to stop anyone making the same mistake as me.....

[iMc]

What a bugger. The XP-120 is pretty big but I think I clears your memory as its vertical height is higher. check the thermalright site to make sure.

[twistedturq]

Shouldnt the fan be sitting the other way around mate?

I.E The actual fan should be facing the back of your parallel port.

[DR]

I also suspect that the fact you are using Corsair Pro ram which is a lot higher than standard ram may be a problem.

[Rave]

Can you not put the RAM in the next slots along I.E. the black ones rather than the blue ones?

Rich :¬)

[GingerNinja.net]

What a bugger. The XP-120 is pretty big but I think I clears your memory as its vertical height is higher. check the thermalright site to make sure.

Checked the site and the XP-120 is totally compatible with the Asus A8V Deluxe. Found some people who are using the same set-up as me except they are using OCZ memory and they don't have any problems whatsoever.

[GingerNinja.net]

Shouldnt the fan be sitting the other way around mate?

I.E The actual fan should be facing the back of your parallel port.

Nope. The fan draws air in and over the vanes and out the back. You can also add an extra 80mm fan at the back to double your airflow - and noise.

The fan is pictured with the exhaust facing the I/O ports and therefore my rear case fan.

[GingerNinja.net]

I also suspect that the fact you are using Corsair Pro ram which is a lot higher than standard ram may be a problem.

It may well be, but I would have thought that Asus would have checked what the tallest DIMM's on the market were and factored that in so that all their current boards were compatible - that's what I would do from a design perspective.

All they needed to do was make the heatpipes slightly taller so the fan was slightly higher. Then again, this is MASSIVE and would probably be exceeding the standard ATX case size if it got much bigger.

[GingerNinja.net]

Can you not put the RAM in the next slots along I.E. the black ones rather than the blue ones?

Rich :¬)

I wish I could as that would fix all my problems. According to the motherboard manual, if I do that, it won't work.

[Steve]

Well for starters Corsair Pro RAM is unusually huge so don't blame ASUS for that one

Also, have you had a look to see if you can turn the fan around in that thing? Then you could run it the other way round and still have air travelling in the right direction.