Installed

Akasa Venom falls into the category of large coolers, the ones designed to give you significant overclocking headroom while being trouble-free air-coolers. When installed, the Venom dwarfs every other component on the motherboard. While it's tall, it should fit in most PC cases that aren't slim.


There's all the world's space at the VRM area for a second "pull" fan. Even with a thick high-flow 120 mm fan installed, the Venom does not crowd the VRM area of our GIGABYTE X58A-UD7. There's plenty of clearance with the longer VRM heatsink north of the CPU socket.


The GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 is a very crowded motherboard, its designers made lavish use of heatsinks to keep key components cool. The Venom maintains a safe distance from the northbridge heatsink. The detachable Hybrid Silent Pipe northbridge heatsink assembly won't in any way obstruct the normal installation of the Akasa Venom.


This is the key area where clearance is king. A badly designed cooler would deprive you of a memory slot, thereby making two other slots on the LGA1366 motherboard useless (if you want to properly populate every memory slot and retain a stable triple-channel configuration). The fan supplied with the Akasa Venom gives plenty of clearance for the memory slots, although it hovers over the slot closest to the CPU socket. There's enough clearance for you to install a standard height memory module on that slot without having to detach Venom's fan for the process. Certain kinds of memory heatsinks that are a little taller than the standard height may also fit, some taller ones may give you clearance issues.