SilverStone Argon Cooler Round Up

Installing the SST-AR07 and SST-AR08 is rather simple but does take a little time to complete.  The hardware included is shown below and consist of a universal backplate for LGA 115x and AMD systems, a set of Intel mounting arms and a plate for AMD systems.  The bag contains all of the extra hardware you will need including stand-offs for LGA 2011 and screws to attach the mounting arms.

I’ll be testing these coolers on the LGA 115x platform so the first step is to locate the parts needed to install the backplate and mount it to the motherboard.  You will need the felt washers since the standoffs will be making contact with the PCB.

Install the backplate as shown and ensure the area around the plate is clear.

The standoffs are used to create a mounting platform for the heatsink and need to be finger tight to begin the next step.

Using the included screws mount the Intel arms to the heatsink base.  The slots in the arms will fit a variety of processor platforms down to LGA 775 and even LGA 1366.

Apply some thermal compound to your CPU.  I prefer the 5 dot method applied in the pattern shown in the photo.  On LGA 115x processors the center of the heat spreader is often taller than the edges to aid in installation.  Because of this you’ll want to make sure the dots have a similar amount of paste and equidistant from the center.

Orient the heatsink how it will fit in your case and use the larger thumb nuts to lock down each corner.  With all heatsinks be sure to tighten each corner in stages and move across the heatsink in an X pattern which is more like a 8.  The intent is to apply even pressure to all corners and make sure the center of the heatsink is flat on the processor.

This step sounds easy enough however I do take issue with the thumb nuts.  With my system the VRM coolers are quite large making it almost impossible to tighten the upper left corner with any confidence.  In fact I had a bad mount during my test forcing me to remount the heatsink which was annoying at best.

I would have liked there to be a way to use a screw driver to secure these nuts or forgo them completely in favor of hex nuts.

The final step will be to install the fan.  Silverstone includes two sets of wire fan clips in case you want to set your cooler up in a push pull config.