Spire TME III (TherMax Eclipse III) CPU Cooler Review

In the box the TME III comes “pre-assembled” with one fan attached. The second one you have to attach with the provided rubber fan mounts of which they include two spares. As you may have seen from early pictures the fan cables are ridiculously short, and there’s a good reason for this. The included 4 pin extension cables should be used, these are braided too. My only concern is if you do not have dual 4 pin PWM fan headers by your CPU socket you may struggle because a splitter isn’t provided. Put simply you need two 4 pin headers by the CPU to run both fans, if you don’t have two you will have to buy a 4 pin fan splitter out of your own pocket.

The installation was enjoyable as Spire use my preferred method of mounting whereby you secure the backplate to the motherboard first and then secure the heatsink to the backplate after the backplate is already firmly secured. I was a little disappointed with the rubber fan mounts because they are particularly hard to fit when the heatsink is mounted, yes you have to take the fans off on both sides to be able to mount the heatsink. The top rubber fan mounts can be attached easily but the bottom fan mounts are very tricky due to the lack of room and visibility of what you’re actually doing. Although, it was relatively easily done with a little patience.

The TME III blocks no PCI express lanes which is nice. The TME III does encroach upon the first DRAM slot which does mean high profile RAM will no work there. The same would probably happen on the other side if you were using LGA 2011 or LGA 1366. So bare that in mind when considering the TME III.

As you can see from the “close-up” you can comfortably fit low profile RAM modules like Kingston HyperX.

The heatsink and fan combination is not overwhelmingly big, even if you have super-high motherboard heatsinks you should in the most part have no compatibility issues. With this cooler (and most other coolers) motherboard heatsink clearance is identical to RAM clearance.