Installation Tips

Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is designed for Intel LGA775 and AMD K8 and K10 processors. For the latter platforms the cooler comes bundled with a swing-clip with a locking tab that catches on to the hooks of the standard plastic retention frame:

To install this cooler onto Intel processors you have to use four screws to fasten two steel retention panels to the base of the cooler and then put the rubber washers on them:

Then turn the cooler upside down, put the mainboard on it – making sure that heatpipes will not interfere with any mainboard components – and tighten the screw-nuts with plastic washers on the back of the mainboard PCB:

As you may remember, Cooler Master coolers are installed exactly the same way. Now we absolutely have to give Thermaltake engineers due credit for finally giving up the inconvenient and unreliable plastic spindle-clips. However, we think it would be nice if Thermaltake also provided a backplate for LGA775 mainboards, because the board bends a lot when the cooler is installed and the screws are tightened.

The cooler is very compact at the base. Heatpipes didn’t interfere with any of the heatsinks around the processor socket on our DFI LANPARTY DK X48-T2RS mainboard, although there was only 2 mm between the cooler and one of them:

Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro doesn’t interfere with tall heat-spreaders on the memory DIMMs. Moreover, this pretty large cooler fit easily and very nicely into the system case:

However, it turned out a little hard to connect 8-pin power cable to the board as well as the power connector of our Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro, which was right beneath the heatsink. However, you may not experience the same problems on other mainboards.

It doesn’t really matter which way the cooler is facing when it is installed into the system case (the mainboard is in vertical position). There is no mention of any preferred positioning in the installation guide. Our own experience showed that with the heatpipes in the horizontal position (parallel to the system power supply unit) the cooling efficiency improves by ~1.5°C during maximum CPU utilization compared against cooler positioning with the heatpipes facing upwards.

Thermaltake BigTyp 14Pro is equipped with three blue LEDs, so the cooler looks really nice in the dark:

They have very good lighting intensiveness: not too bright to start annoying you at some point, and not too dimmed to be unnoticed.