Installation
Installing the Alpine 11 is more complicated than the installing the stock cooler, but also much easier. The stock cooler requires pressing quite hard on the push pins while hoping that they’re line up correctly, I’ve never liked that. Arctic Cooling includes fairly detailed instructions, as pictured below.
The Alpine 11 is installed in two stages, first you attach the two plastic brackets using two part pushpins (which are obvious about whether they are installed correctly or not!), and then you use four included screws to attach the Alpine 11 to the bracket. The Alpine 11 comes with Arctic Cooling’s excellent MX-4 thermal transfer compound pre-applied, so that isn’t an issue.
Everybody loves pictures, so here we are with the plastic brackets in place as well as the first half of the pushpins. (Not to mention some thermal compound I hadn’t fully removed yet, whoops)
Next we put the black plastic second pushpin parts in place, like so:
Last, we screw the heatsink to the brackets. Removing the fan can make this easier if you’re using a magnetic screwdriver with a thick shaft.
I removed the fan, so I’ll put it back and give you a couple more pictures, as well as one of the stock cooler for reference.
In the stock cooler picture you can see the thermocouple probe I used for measuring the ambient temps during testing, we’ll talk about that in the testing section, which happens to be next.
