The clip on the CH5-5K12 is very stiff to use. Rather then being securely integrated within the construction of the heatsink design, it fits in through a small opening in the body and side aluminum panels. By means of some heavy duty fulcrum action, this clip keeps the heatsink very securely in place above a processor. I would be a bit wary during the clip down process on a AMD chip because of the effort involved... but considering how hard it is to even clip down a boxed AMD heatsink I don't think there is any real cause for concern.

For our tests, the thermal pad which comes standard from Coolermaster was removed. We found that the temperature dropped about a degree once this was done. For comparisons sake this also yields a better results. Each of the reference heatsinks were tested using only AOS thermal compound.

Getting down to the testing we can see from the results of our synthetic tests that the Coolermaster CH5-5K12 performed even better than the much touted (and for fairness sake much lighter and smaller) KingCooler Thermalbuster.

The only concession to its superior performance is the CH5-5K12 is moderately noisy with its fan whereas the Thermalbuster was basically silent. In comparison the PowerCooler, a typical generic socket 370 heatsink performed much poorer in both of the large and small die template tests.

When used with the smaller copper die template is was unable to keep the temperature below the all important 70 degree mark. The CH5-5K12 on the other hand showed a rise in temperature of about 38 degrees with a small die, and 27 degrees with the larger die template. Comparatively the PowerCooler posted a 42+ degree rise in temperature. The rise in thermistor temperature above the ambient is shown below for all three heatsinks in the chart below.