Installation Tips

ASUS Royal Knight is designed for Socket 939/AM2(+) and LGA 775 processors. It comes bundled with the following two types of retention:

As you see, everything is very simple, although not as reliable and secure, as in case the cooler is fastened through the mainboard PCB to a backplate on the reverse side. We have absolutely justified concerns about the LGA 775 retention kit. The thing is that the screws holding the retention brackets at the cooler base are not just too short, but also aren’t made of hardened metal. As a result, even without too much effort on your part, you can easily strip the thread of these screws and the retention brackets will not hold on the cooler base. I had to replace these screws with longer and more reliable ones.

As for installation on DFI LANPARTY DK X48-T2RS mainboard we used, I would like to point out two peculiarities. First, it is extremely inconvenient to push in the plastic clips of the LGA 775 retention brackets into the special holes in the mainboard PCB. But it is even harder to take them out. And second, is cooler’s limited compatibility with existing mainboards. Look how close the heatpipes and heatsink plates are to the heatsinks on the mainboard voltage regulator and chipset components and the connecting heatpipes:

As you probably understand, it is a particular compatibility case valid for this specific mainboard model and ASUS Royal Knight cooler. However, I have never come across partially compatible LGA 775 cooling solutions before. As a result, there are only two installation options possible, and I am going to talk about them later in our review.

The installation manual (PDF file, 1.71 MB) says that ASUS Royal Knight shouldn’t be installed with the ends of four heatpipes looking down. ASUS believes that the preferred position for this cooler is with the heatpipes lying horizontally (hereinafter we are talking about tower cases):

In this case the cooler fit perfectly fine onto my mainboard:

However, despite ASUS” recommendations, the second available cooler positioning on my mainboard, namely with the heatpipe ends facing up, allowed it to cool the processor 5°C better!

My suspicions that the contact between the cooler base and the processor heat-spreader wasn’t perfect enough vanished when I checked the thermal paste imprint on the cooler base in both cases. I also have to add that there was no efficiency difference between these two installation positions in an open testbed.

The white LED highlighting on the fan looks very pretty and unobtrusive:

The recommended retail price for ASUS Royal Knight is set at around $60.