As promised - Here's the testing I did with the Frio OCK CPU cooler.
Took a few pics of the setup and what it looks like with everything in place.
One of the pics shows the clearance you'd have if used with the board I have (Crosshair V) and what RAM I had to run for clearance. Obviously you cannot run any sticks with an extended heatspreader but as I said before regular sticks work with it. I did note though the stick towards the cooler was a little warmer than the other stick, mainly due to it being close to the heatpipes and the obvious lack of airflow vs the outer stick but that's to be expected in this case.

OK - I setup the machine to do these test runs using the same exact settings for all runs with the exception of the number of cores that were active to similate what a given numbered cored chip may do with it, be it an unlocked chip or not.
Of course chips with less cores used/active will tend to run cooler and my testing reflected this as expected. The conditions of these runs and other relevant info are within the testing setup pic and these runs were literally done back-to-back, the only pause being the time it took to enable cores by rebooting to do so in the BIOS as the testing progressed. I used the settings I had to emulate what you'd normally expect how an individual would setup the system with proper voltages used for the CPU and as most tend to do via multiplier. I used the 20X multi to place all of the OC'ing load on the CPU itself to give the cooler a chance to show what it's really capable of.
Note the detail for each run in the screenies. I allowed HWmonitor to run for getting the max themal values during each run and you can see this with each screenie that shows the end of a run. The other is to show the setup & temps seen for each run right before it was started.
The testing setup screenie is the very last pic and it shows the relevant info you'd want to see.

I'll let you guys be the judge based on the info within the screenies from each run.

Thank you for posting this.

Very thorough test :thumbsup:

What's an air cooler lmao

Last one I got was a tt big typhoon when they first came out :)

You are most welcome and happy to do it. :good:

It appears as though the cooler covers the first two mem slots? is that the case?

Most high performance coolers do...

its nature of the beast. more thermal capacity = bigger cooler..... bigger cooler = well bigger cooler :laughing:

Why did you run the cooler in that position? Seems rotating it 90 degrees like they are normally mounted would alleviate some of the ram height issue. I do not know how large the fan is, but assuming a 25mm stance it should still allow to use high height RAM even with fan blowing RAM to VRMs.

Using a 38mm fan on my megahalem, I actually put it on the back side, as 38mm shoves it across the first 2 DIMM slots. Standard ram still works fine though.

For sandyB I run in the orientation you are running because miah suggested it runs slightly cooler, which does effect mounting RAM, but I put the fan blowing towards the vid card not sucking the air from it. (Generally CPUs are so much cooler than GPUs that blowing the warmed air from the CPU still helps cool the backside of the card :) )

56c max temps at any given load? Cooler than my old QX6700, lol.

I wish it was capable of being mounted 90 degrees from where it is but this is one cooler that will only mount up one way, based on how the MB maker places the mounting holes in the board.
That would be a huge help in solving the RAM useage problem if it did but this cooler is not one of those you can turn the way you want.
Yes, if I had set it to exhaust towards the GPU that may have helped temps a little but I did have a small fan blowing onto the board to similate things as if it were in a case with proper airflow, plus to help it get air for the reason you stated about drawing air in. On that note it would help the CPU but make the GPU run hotter - The Thuban will throw out some heat and this cooler will pick it up and move it too.

I can make it rujn even hotter if I wanted to but the Thuban tends to have a thermal spike while trying to boot if I go too high with voltage. I'm not aware of any aircooler that can fix that problem and it even happens if it's on watercooling too. You can then give it even more juice but even that has it's limits as I know already - Been there, tried that with the Thuban.

Roger that, thanks for the explanation. Been out of the AMD game for a while and forgot about the rectangular hole pattern.

Weird they would not include a mounting bracket to mount the cooler the right orientation though :S