Phanteks PH-TC12DX CPU Cooler Review
Ryan Martin / 11 years ago
To mount the fans you have to use the fan clips and those black plastic inserts.
You can see the procedure a bit more closely here, but it is explained quite clearly in the manual.
Adding two fans makes the heatsink quite chunky but RAM compatibility is still good.
We have some quite conventional fan clips even if the plastic inserts make the design slightly different (and more complicated) than the normal clip on procedure.
Installation requires you to secure your backplate and relevant mounting brackets.
With them installed you have the option to choose the orientation of the cooler from front-back or top-bottom.
RAM clearance is pretty tight but should be okay on most ATX motherboards. Motherboards that lack any space between the CPU socket demarcations and the DIMM slots may have trouble with the first DIMM slot. By that we suggest you look above and see that there is about 5-7mm between the CPU socket markings and first DIMM slot. Some motherboards like the P8Z77-V LX do not have this spacing.
Here you can see that the plastic fan inserts would actually touch a DIMM in that slot, fortunately the fan clips wouldn’t.
The unit is relatively “high off the ground” and isn’t going to conflict with any VRM heatsinks.
Overall the unit looks pretty good and I can see this blue and white theme working very well with Gigabyte’s Z77X-UD3H motherboard and some white & blue Corsair Vengeance Pro memory.