Installation:

Installation was pretty much a breeze. When I first saw the unit I did not think it was going to fit. But anyways back to this backplate problem I was having. I realized shortly after I got the product that it would not work with my Gigabyte motherboard. This is because Gigabyte uses tension pins to hold its stock bracket in and in order to use the XP-90C you need a backplate you could screw into.

Upon further investigation I found that Thermalright was a ware of this problem and had made a backplate for it. I order one for only $4.99 straight from Thermalright and this solved my problems. The backplate is displayed in the first picture above.

With that problem taken care of I was able to screw in the AMD bracket with ease. Then I layed a thin layer of Arctic Silver on the CPU.

Now it was time to put the heatsink on, now right away I discovered that it is muck easier to put this on at an angle instead of putting it on flat and pushing the clips down. Another thing is try to remove memory modules too, you might find this to be a lot easier to install once you take your memory out.

Once the heatsink was secured I stepped back to notice how big this monster really is, and as you can see from the pictures above it definitely is big. After it is on you simply place the rubber strips along the unit so that fan vibration is not an issue.

The fan went on with no problem at all. What you had to do was find the clips for the 92mm fans and simply place the ends on the holes in the heatsink and bend them up to clip over the fan and secure it. Now that it is finally installed lets see how it performs.

Performance:

Test Bed:
- Thermalright XP-90C
- Panaflo 92mm High Power
- AMD Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester)
- Gigabyte nForce4 GA-K8NF-9

As you can see above the XP-90C clearly takes home the trophy. I plan on using this in an upcoming overclocking article too so be on the look out for that. This heatsink does a really good job with heat dissipation. I even ended up hooking the panaflo up to a fan controller and ran it on low. The temperatures were still very low. This is what makes this appealing to overclockers, it is by far one of the best heatsinks on the market today, and the cooling power is just awesome.

Conclusion:

The XP-90C is by far the best AMD64 cooler I have seen on the market yet. It just performs so well by keeping those temperatures low. It's not only limited to AMD either, it can fit on Intel also. All the hardware is provided, except for my case because the manufacture of my motherboard had to use a plastic backplate and push pins :(.

It is an easy install for anyone, there really is not a lot to it. No more playing around with a flat head screw driver attempting to push a clip over a socket clip and possibly slipping and running into the motherboard. All you need is your hands here, and no worries of slipping and potentially damaging a motherboard. I think anyone would be happy with this buy.

I would like to thank the guys at HeatSink Factory for letting me review this item. If you have not checked them out make sure you do. Also I want to say again that this will most likely be a feature in my overclocking article coming up soon.