Installation

In theory, the pushpin installation should allow you the luxury of not first removing your motherboard; however, in practice it probably will be a lot less frustrating if you do remove it first. This is not due to the heatsink installation as those pushpin makes mounting it a snap, what was a real tedious process was mounting the fan. In most cases mounting the fan should be the easy part of the installation and not the hard part.


If you follow the included instructions, what Xigmatek will have you do is first mount the two 775 mounting brackets to the bottom of the heatsink. This is easy and straight forward and we have no issue with this step. What they then have you do in place a small amount of TIM on the CPU and then install the heatsink by pushing down on the four pushpins (alternate corners, two at a time); once again no big deal.

However, you are then expected to install those four anti-vibration mounts to the fan (by threading them through the hole and then pulling it tight, they have little pyramid shaped parts that when pulled through keep the rubber mount tight to the fan) and then install the whole shebang onto the heatsink. This is where the wheels fall off and the whole thing becomes a bit of a train wreck.


I am sure in the engineers' minds who wrote these instructions (and we are sure that only an engineer could come up with such a convoluted process) this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, mounting those little suckers means sticking them between two fins and then pushing them into place. Yes, these mounts are split in the middle and you are expected to thread all four of them through the fins before they can be full seated, this is probably possible except for the fact that your motherboard is still in your case and you don’t have a heck of a lot of room to work with. So, unless you are a professional contortionist this will be a major pain in the butt.


It is for this reason we strongly recommend you either first remove the motherboard from the case and follow these “interesting” instructions or do what we did: install those little pieces of rubber onto the heatsink first, then install the heatsink and then thread the four ends through the fan and using a pair pliers seat the fan on them.

by doing it our way you can easily install the Xigmatek HDT-S1283 without first removing the motherboard and have it all done in under five minutes. Doing it their way, well lets just say it will be a lot longer and leave it at that.