[sswilson]

Moving on, let's get to the start of the installation process for our new heatsink. Shown above are all of the parts we'll need to attach the backplate to the motherboard. We've got the backplate, 4 standoffs/screws, 4 nuts, and Coolermaster has been kind enough to provide us with a phillips nutdriver so that we don't have to dig up a wrench.

If you haven't figured it out yet, installing this cooler requires that you remove your motherboard from the case. Once you have it out it's a simple matter of aligning the backplate with the holes on your board (for AMD the main body of the backplate goes flush on the back of your motherboard), feeding the standoff screws through those holes from the top of the board (image on the left), and then attaching the nuts to the screws from the bottom (image on the right).

Once you have all 4 nuts secure, you can tighten them using the nut driver, however you might want to leave them loose for now to make it easier to line up the mounting screws.

Here's the finished product, ready for mounting the cooler to our motherboard. As I mentioned previously, there's a fair bit of slop in the mounting holes, so it makes life a lot easier if you don't tighten these up yet. This allows for the standoffs to be muscled into place once it comes time to thread the cooler mounting screws.