Installation Tips

By the way, the cooler uses the same retention bracket as Thermalright SI-128 SE:

The cooler is pressed very firmly against the CPU. It doesn’t rotate or shift anywhere, unless you use a crowbar to do it. This is what an installed Thermalright IFX-14 looks like with a single 120-mm fan between the heatsink sections:

You use two wire clips to attach the fan (the cooler is bundled with four clips like that). But before that you have to stick two silicon strips for each fan to the heatsink. A fan installed between the heatsink sections will hit against the cooler retention screws with its lower end (they could have made these screws a little shorter). However, even despite this fact, the fan will be hanging 10mm beneath the heatsink, which will definitely improve the cooling of electronic components around the processor socket.

I didn’t have any 140-mm fans at my disposal at the time of tests, so there will be no results with them in our today’s review. We should very soon get our hands on three new fans from Thermaltake, so we will most likely get back to testing Thermalright IFX-14 with a 140-mm fan later on. And now please check out Thermalright IFX-14 equipped with a single 120x38mm fan and with two 120x25mm fans inside a system case:

It seems to be pretty tight for a massive system like that inside a computer case (I even had to remove three DIMMs out of four). Moreover, there is no room for the third fan for air exhaust any more. However, in my case this function is performed by a fan on the rear panel of the system case, even though it is shifted a little bit to the side. At the same time, I would like to add that the list of mainboards compatible with Thermalright IFX-14 cooler is pretty long. I wish they had also made a compatibility list for the system cases. The distance from the mainboard to the lower plate of the cooler heatsink is ~45mm.