The Basics (continued):
Checking out the base of the cooler has me thinking of the Infinity in terms of a muscle car. The copper base ships with a protective blue film over it, but once exposed it looks like a serious performer. The 5 heatpipes coming out from behind the base look like shiny header pipes on this muscle car's engine, and I hope the performance lives up to the expectations I have developed with my visions of this analogy.
The base is extremely smooth and flat, and as you can see in the above right image it is quite reflective. Not quite a perfect mirror, but it appears to be well machined / polished.
The image below shows most of the other components provided with the Scythe Infinity. You have a variety of mounting clips for use with AMD 754/939/940/AM2 and Intel 478/775, a pouch of fairly generic looking thermal paste, an installation guide, and two spring clips for mounting the fan.
Speaking of a fan, there is one included, but not shown. It is a 120mm unit with a Scythe label on the hub, with specifications as detailed on page one of this review.
Installation:
The first step in the installation is to select the correct CPU mounting clips and attach them to the base of the cooler. These clips are just like the ones that came with the Scythe Mine, and I really like them. They simply slide into a pair of grooves on either side of the base and click when in place, letting you everything is secure and ready to go.
The images above show the Intel LGA 775 mounting clips installed, and with a thin application of the included thermal paste the Infinity was ready for installation. The system used for this review consists of the following components:
» Intel Pentium D840 (3.2 GHz Dual-Core) CPU
» ECS Elitegroup RC410L/800-M Pentium 4 mATX Motherboard
» Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA 3 Gbps Hard Drive
» Buslink DVD R/RW Optical Drive
» OCZ 1GB (2x 512MB) Platinum XTC PC2 5400 DDR2 Memory
» Allied AL-B500E 500 Watt Power Supply
» CentOS Linux 4.4
Even though the Infinity utilizes tool-less motherboard mounting clips (just like the
Scythe Mine and stock Intel cooler), I found that things weren't quite as easy as they should be. The body of the cooling fins is so large that the clips are hard to reach, even with the motherboard out of a case. In addition to removing your motherboard from your case, you may also need to remove your video card, power supply, and most definitely the cooling fan for the Infinity.
This general design of mounting clip is great, but it just loses all of its convenience since you have to come in from such a low angle to reach it. With the amount of effort that wound up being required, you might as well have had to use bolts through your motherboard. In addition to the clips being under the fins, making them hard enough to reach, the clearance between the top of the clips and the lowest fin is narrower than my pointer finger. This just seems like a goof on the design side of things. I don't have particularly big hands, so you guys out there with big sausage fingers might want to recruit a teenager to handle this!
