The mounting procedure is fairly simple. You affix the correct mounting clips to the mounting brackets and then screw these to the cooler. You then hold your backplate into place, and screw from the underside of your motherboard through the backplate and into the bottom of the mounting brackets on the cooler. If you have your motherboard inside a case this is all very easy to do. If like me you have to assemble this without any support for the motherboard, juggling the motherboard, CPU cooler, backplate and screwdriver is challenging to say the least. The Reeven mounting mechanism is average, I’ve seen better but at the end of the day it gets the job done on a lot of CPU sockets and that is all that matters.
The cooler doesn’t block any PCI express lanes although the first PCI express 1X lane is a tight squeeze.
The Reeven Arcziel 12 offers quite a lot of clearance over the VRM heat sinks and the memory slots. Although DIMM slot number one is covered and in most cases tall RAM like G.Skill Trident X or Corsair Vengeance will not fit. However, if you are only running two DIMMs then you will have no compatibility issues.
In case you needed a better angle, then here it is. As you can see there is quite a healthy amount of clearance, just not enough for ridiculously tall RAM like the G.Skill Trident X – although by taking our red heatsink attachments off we were still able to use our RAM underneath this.
Anyone with high motherboard and VRM heatsinks needn’t worry at all – there is plenty of clearance.
Oh boy the cooling market sure doesn’t have a shortage of players. This company has one of the silliest catch phrases out there. Maybe it’s not a bad thing.