Installation and Finished Product
The back plate will sit slightly askew depending on the socket type, but as you can see, the pair of holes around the screws is large enough and the V at the bottom is well clear of the third retention screw. To hold this in place, simply install the plate with the plastic stickers facing down and drive home the screws, which I mentioned in the hardware section.
I already have the top brackets in place and screwed into the bolts that hold the back plate, applied TIM to the CPU, and am now in the tedious process of slowly wrenching the cross-bar into place. While the wrench is handy, the bends of the bar at the sides limits the turn you can get on these bolts.
With the taller memory in the board, you can see it stands taller than the fan. Now the fan can be adjusted upwards on the cooler, but you have to then consider the overall height of the cooler since the fan is already above the caps on the top of the fins.
The second thing you are going to run into is that the two slots closest to the CPU are covered with the fan. This means you either need to run naked RAM sticks, or invest in something low profile, so you can run dual channel or fill all four slots.
Looking down at the motherboard under this large cooler, you can just barely see the memory poking out on the right side, but on the left you have access to the 8-pin connection, and plenty of room before it would hit my video card.
As I try to do now, I just wanted to end with the glamour shot of the Mugen 4 sitting in the D-frame. All I have to do now is swap to my naked G.Skill RipJaws for testing and we can get the thermal and audio results.