Product Showcase (Installation)

 
Liquid cooling is not just about cooling performance, it's about aesthetics predominantly as well. The most beautiful rigs all have some sort of liquid cooling. Basically, we wanted to use a dark motherboard (with 12V RGB connectors) to light up the liquid cooling components.
  

Prepping the motherboard for mounting the cooler is a relatively easy thing to do, though the motherboard back-plate will be most annoying thing to install. You seat a rubber protective cover first, now look at the following photo:
 

We now put in place the back-plate. We could argue that it's not a black colored back-plate, but since it sits behind the motherboard it's not like we're gonna see it anyway. Make sure you align the three visible socket screws with the back plate. See the standoff screw to the left? we'll be securing the back-plate in place from the opposing side with these screws, DO NOT forget to use a washer. Let's flip the motherboard around. 

Take your time here and take it slow, this is the most tricky part of the installation. Once you seated the new back-plate on the backside, you line up and secure the four screws until you can't turn them any further. Do not forget to use the plastic washers here or you could potentially damage the motherboard PCB. Once seated, flip the motherboard around and check the backside again. Check if that rubber protective insert is seated well, as it prevents the metal backplate getting in contact with electric pins located at the backside (and this prevents shorting the motherboard out).

BTW in case you noticed - we use two motherboards in this article, one for the actual cooler tests (which is our default mobo+CPU). But since that mobo does not have RGB connectors, we'll swap it out for the RGB photoshoot with something nicer.