Review

ExtremeTech, Aug. 30, 2007
Powerful Peltier Cooling--Monsoon II Lite

By Jason Cross

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Setting It Up

Some air-cooling units are very easy to set up. Just snap off your current CPU cooler and snap on the new one. Not so with the Monsoon II Lite; it's a little more complicated than that.

For starters, there's the PCI control unit. You'll need to find a spare PCI slot to stick this into, and stretch a few cables to it.

The Monsoon II Lite replaces the big 5.25?bay box with this small PCI controller card.

Then there's the main cooling unit. You have to remove your motherboard, attach a retention plate to the back of it, and screw the cooler down with four spring-loaded thumb screws. These can be pretty hard to get to, so it's recommended you do this before placing the motherboard back into your case.

In addition to the cooler and controller card, there the retention plate and cables to deal with.

After replacing your motherboard, you have to plug a standard Molex power plug into the controller card, attach a cord from the controller to the cooling unit, and connect a third plug to your motherboard's CPU fan control. While the cooling unit is narrow, it hangs out a bit to the front and rear, which makes it nearly impossible to remove or install RAM in many motherboards. Doing so will require removing the cooling unit. It's a pretty tight squeeze.

The cooling unit didn bump into any other components, but it can be a pretty tight squeeze. We would have to remove the cooler to access all RAM slots.

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