Glacialtech Alaska CPU Cooler Review

Installing the Alaska CPU Cooler

The Alaska comes with everything needed to mount up to your Intel LGA or AMD AM2/3 socket. GlacialTech also provides two sets of fan spring clips, thermal paste and a small wrench.

First, a little information on the installation instructions. Now normally I dont bring these up in reviews because I rarely have issue with them. These I did. The instructions are a single small sheet of paper. To get it all to fit on the paper the illustrations had to be shrunk down. This combined with black and white photos made things a little hard to see. I went to the GlacialTech site and got the electronic version in PDF and could zoom in. It helped, but if you have your system torn down to change the cooler and you have no other PC in the house it can get annoying very quickly.

Then for the AMD section the steps and hardware used in the illustrations look nothing like what is provided. An enthusiast or user with a couple builds under their belt may not have an issue installing the cooler, but a noob straight out of the gate on their first build may struggle trying to figure out the process in the illustrations with the parts they have in their hand.

With the upper mounting clips installed on the cooler you can then mount it to your board. Again, this is a very annoying process due to the width of the Alaskas cooling fins. They almost cover the mounting studs for the LGA1366 configuration. Those with LGA775 or 1156 sockets a screwdriver will not be an option. You will have to finger tighten the mount, and then snug it up with the supplied wench. That can get a little tricky depending on how tall motherboard components are around your socket.

With everything finally mounted it looks good; it clears all the components and the fan spring clips do not make the cooler wider.

RAM clearance is like most coolers anymore. Anything over 40mm isnt going to work if the cooler hangs over a slot.