It seems to me that Gigabyte has a very good air cooler. It is easy to mount and unmount once you have a retention ring attached to the motherboard ( you only need to use the one included if you have an LGA775). It is compatible with AMD64 including the AM2 (which in all honesty, I think that most of the 754/939 cooler will be able to lock on the AM2, though I’m not sure), compatible with the old(er) 478 socket and LGA775 from Intel, has enough clearance around it when seated on a motherboard and because of its design it can help with cooling the components around the socket. Oh and not to forget that it is silent, especially when the RPM is at the lowest, and all that without sacrificing on cooling performance. It can get loud on the max setting, but this is only needed if you are overclocking a lot and need it. The temperature differences between the low and high settings were very negligable.

The max temp it went was 47c and that was on a test that took a bit over 3 hours to finish and was really taxing the CPU with an ambient room temp of 25~26c. The thing that might put some people off, is its height perhaps. Well, the case I’ve tested it with is around 17~18cm, and it had no trouble even with a side panel fan provided that I didn’t use the duct. There is no way to use it with a slim pc though, or a case that has the PSU over the CPU. Another worry that I had was that the plastic lever of the AMD64 could break, but after mounting it a couple of times I couldn’t see it happening unless I tried to.

All in all, I think this is a good cooler with good performance and a straight forward installation, with a tool less mounting mechanism to mount on the socket.

Big thanks go out to Gigabyte and Cindy for arranging the sample.