The Mounting System

The kryos HF mounting system is a piece-wise mounting system like the EK mounting systems.  It’s fundamentally the same installation for all sockets, with the only a change in spacers between the backplate and the back of the board.  Here’s a walkthrough installation on LGA1366.

All the parts needed; LGA1366 requires the four white washers, four black 3mm spacers, and the rubber insulator.  First four steps are to place the M4 x 10mm screws into the backplate.

Steps five through eight are to place the black spacers on the screws opposite from the screwhead.  Step nine is to place the rubber insulator onto the backplate.  Due to the open-ended insulator holes, installing the backplate on anything but a flat surface is exceedingly difficult.

Steps ten is to place the motherboard on the four screws.  Steps eleven through fourteen are to place the white washers on the screws.  There is very, very little threading protruding after the washers are placed.

Steps fifteen through eighteen are to thread the hex spacers to the short screws.  Problem is, the screws are really short and to expose enough screw to start the threading requires bending the board down at the socket corners.   Step 19 is to flip the board over.  Step 20 through 23 is to finish tightening the screws to the hex nuts.  Note that the screwhead is Pozidriv, not Phillips, so if you have a Pozidriv driver or bit, use that.  Not a major concern considering you should only tighten to hand-tightened levels–the hex spacer and screw assembly needs to be able to spin a little.  Do not use pliers to hold the hex spacers on the front of the board…a little slippage and you can easily knock an SMD component off the motherboard.

Step 24 is to flip the board back over.  Steps 25 through 28 are to twist the hex spacers clockwise (as to not loosen the hex spacer and screw assembly) so that the block may be placed onto the board (if the hex spacer is not rotated properly, the mounting plate will not slip over it).  Step 29 is to place the block on the board.

Steps 30 through 33 are to place the springs on the hex spacers.  Steps 34 through 37 are to tighten the thumbnuts until they stop. There are no included (or optional) washers to prevent wear to the mounting plate from the springs.

Overall, I think this mounting system is pretty poor.   Just to get the backplate/threaded post assembly attached takes much longer than the entire Koolance mounting process and significantly longer than the Swiftech mounting process.  Tightening the thumbscrews isn’t much easier or faster, either.

Attempting this with a board that isn’t completely removed from the case (even connected to the PSU or to the HDDs) just makes it even more difficult.  I can’t imagine doing it on anything but a flat surface either–the threaded posts don’t stick straight out (toward the board’s mounting holes) without pressure to all four of the screw heads at once and the rubber insulator doesn’t have closed holes for Intel sockets, meaning it will just fall out unless mounting is done on a flat surface.

Aside from the annoyingly long assembly process, tightening the thumbscrews gets painful after too few mounts.  The stopping point of the thumbscrews provides a lot of pressure, which is good for performance, but when you factor in the fact the thumbscrew head is only 3.4mm tall (compared to 10mm from Swiftech, 8mm from Koolance, and 16mm from EK Easy Mount), The amount of pressure (i.e., stress) on your fingers as you do the final tightening is much higher than any other mounting system.

To make matters even worse, the thumbscrews stop less than 25mm above the board–there are a lot of boards with IOH/NB/VRM heatsinks that are higher than that and are also close to the socket area.  The board I test on, MSI X58 Big Bang, is one such board.  The last few millimeters of tightening are really hard because of the VRM heatsink–in one corner it’s such that, on every mount and unmount, I cut up the nail-side of my finger trying to turn the thumbscrews, and in another corner I just can’t fit much of my finger so I’m forced to use just one part of the pad of my finger to do the tightening, meaning I couldn’t distribute the stress.

In terms of unmounting, the mounting plate holds the hex spacer and prevents it from loosening, which is a useful attribute that the kinda-similar Heatkiller 3.0 mounting system does not have.  But again, the amount of stress on the finger tips is really high and due to the size and positioning of the thumbscrews, only certain parts of your fingers can be used (depending on the board).

I see a few ways to fix some of these flaws:

1) use M4 x 12mm screws for the backplate/hex spacer assembly instead of M4 x 10mm.  This will allow for noticeably easier installation of the backplate and change the stopping point of the thumbscrews to be higher off the board (up to 2mm higher), alleviating a lot of the thumbscrew issues.  My hunch is, with the springs and amount of travel this mounting system uses (and the extremely high stock mounting pressure), the loss in performance would be minimal and this could be a good trade to improve usability.  This is also something an end-user can do.

2) use thumbscrews with taller/thicker heads.  More surface area to grip = less pressure = less finger stress.  Taller screwheads also mean easier ability to grip when board heatsinks begin to interfere because they’re higher above the motherboard.

3) add some sort of tool compatibility, maybe cut in some sort of screwhead into the thumbscrew.