I got this together without much fuss.
The motherboard is well laid out. The only change all manufacturers need to make is to locate the ram further away from the CPU. Many aftermarket heatsinks will interfere with some of the taller ram heatsinks. The CPU retention bracket is very sturdy.
As you can see, the Coolermaster H212 heatsink is massive compared with the stock Intel. Aside from the 1155 socket pin locations, this heatsink is virtually identical to those used on the Core2Duos.
The H212 mounting plate is very sturdy. It comes with a socket to tighten the nuts with a Philips screwdriver.
The heatsink screws to the mounting plate. It seemed to take a lot of paste to cover the base. This heatsink doesn't have a flat mounting plate. instead, the heatpipes make direct contact with the processor. It I hadn't purchased the low profile Corsair, I would've had to move the fan to the other side and set it up to pull. My friend has an identical processor and due to his ram heatsinks, set his up this way without any loss is cooling capacity. I'm getting 30 to 35 C at idle and 50 to 55 C under 90 to 100% load.
Much of the case instructions were in Engrish. I had to search the internet to figure out how to make the case fan control work. Overall, I'm pleased with the case. The grommets needed to be larger. My install would've been easier if I had a modular power supply. I ended up tucking many of the wired in the 3.5 bays and coiling the rest behind the power supply.
This was helpful. If I hadn't read the case instructions, I would've never figured out how to get the components in:
I thought this would make a good bumper sticker or t-shirt:
I had lots of wires to hide:
I managed to wedge everything in and get the sides on:
I may get an SSD later but I'm pleased with this build so far. I've tried TF2, Batman AA, Portal 2, and Dead Island on max setting, 16 x AA and AF. The only game that's really pushing the card is Dead Island. The twin fans are very loud when they get going.
While I like the motherboard, MSI need to do a better job on their bios interface. They use the graphical bios and the version that came on it was very clunky. You are supposed to be able to update it by using the Live Update feature available by booting to the driver disk. This failed to boot for me. I eventually got the bios setting correct for my ram and drives and installed Windows 7. Once that was installed, I was able to update the bios. The newest version is much less clunky. However, it wiped all of my settings.
