hi,

bought a scythe ninja which is supposedly compatible with my MSI NF4 Platinum SLI motherboard

however the heatpipes on one side firmly touch the capacitors... is this acceptable / safe?

The caps are bent back a touch, are firm against the small blocks shown, they are not touching anything else...







have not installed fully, only a dry run so have not put AS5 on or powered up, grateful for your views

cheers

Yea it's safe.

Yikes.....doesn't look safe to me. Almost looks like the pressure on the heatpipes could give uneven pressure on the CPU (tilting the ninja base slightly). It doesn't take much torque to tilt the base.....I'd worry.

My Ninja presses some on the caps around my CPU socket on my Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G. It doesn't press hard enough to damage anything, so I'm not worried.

Either it is a perfect fit, or the caps (which are not allowed to tilt any more due to the blocks) are causing the heatsink base to have uneven pressure. At that point it's hard to tell from any photo...

thanks for the replies / views

I am in two minds... I have seen coolers like the xp120 that press against capacitors like this as well as comments from manufacturers who state that the cooler will do this...

I am able to return this cooler as I have not taken the protective strip off the bottom of the cooler yet, so can repackage as it came.

Presently I have put my zalman cnpa7000 alcu back on...

You might want to read this link before you install that HSF touching the caps.

I stumbled across that thread while searching for HSF solutions for my P5B-E build.

That article is referring to shorts on the back of the motherboard. Some motherboards have tiny capacitors inside the "keep out" zone that the original Ninja backplate sits on.

The issue in this thread is with the large capacitors on the front of the motherboard.

The caps themselves won't be harmed by being shoved like this, but Bluefront's comment is valid: if the Ninja isn't seating flat on the CPU, cooling could be compromised.

However, based on the (excellent) photos above, I'd say there's little to no chance of that.

While that may be true, I don't understand how the heat pipes can touch caps on the back side of the board. The poster specifically says"... it was the heatpipes on the Ninja touching capacitors on the board, shorting out the board!"

If he's referring to caps on the back side of the board, how could the heat pipes touch those caps?

Edit: I agree the HP touching the caps shouldn't cause a short in and of itself. But I would also think heat transfer would be a major issue for the caps. Thoughts?

Caps being bent by, and touching the exposed metal of the heatsink just seems like a very undesirable situation. I wouldn't allow that to happen in any of my systems. Period.

Well I went back and reread it, and he does indeed say what you quote. In his particular case it was caps on the front not the back. I've read other stories about caps on the back being shorted by the backplate. I guess both are possible... Sorry for the confusion.

As for the heat pipes cooking the caps, don't worry. The pipes are actually cooler than the caps. In my Pentium D system (where the CPU ran over 80C) the Ninja heat pipes measured around 45C (warm to the touch). The VRM caps on the other hand were downright hot to the touch (and died after about a year).

Lest that worry you, don't be alarmed. That was a very special case: a 150W overclocked CPU on a P5LD2 motherboard with inadequate VRM cooling. A Conroe draws much less power, and the photos of your motherboard show it has very substantial VRM cooling.

I actually used to have an old P2/3 system with a slot cooler that if the cooler touched the capacitors on the board, the system would reboot. I managed to add a piece of plastic to the retention mechanism to keep it from touching. Hardly an ideal solution but it made the computer usable.

cheers for all the input

I have today returned the ninja to the store for a full refund, the bent caps was not something I was prepared to run with 24x7. S939 boards are hard enough to find atm and from the looks of many they may suffer similar issues...

the dfi range looked potentially fine, and I looked into getting a dfi, but tbh it was not worth the hassle to swapping out the mobo for a cooler

looking at the tuniq now as the clearance and footprint is more suitable, a little concerned about the weight nonetheless

That's an interesting problem--I just rebuilt my wife's computer and there were 3 large troublesome caps, 2 right next to each other and another. The single cap had to get angled away from my heatsink (MCX462-V for Socket A) to keep from touching, and the other 2 were lined up so one was "trapped" between the other and heatsink. Took some time to angle that awayt enough so I could *barely* slip a piece of paper through the gap.

I'm actually wondering if it would be better for the caps to touch the large copper base--it might actually provide cooling for them in that case?