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A few months ago when I first reviewed the full Senfu water-cooling kit, I had two major reservations about it. Firstly was the quality of the documentation and secondly was the strength and reliability of the mounting methods for the water-jacket. Senfu have taken these commentson board to some extent and a little while ago sent me their new attachment kit for naked Athlon CPU's. A "naked" Athlon, btw, is a SlotA CPU with the black cartridge and heat-plate removed. This allows direct access to the core and cache chips for more efficient cooling.

My first gripe remains unaddressed - in fact, this kit arrived with no documentation whatsoever. Admittedly, Senfu sent this to me early so it may be pre-release, and hence the documentation may not be ready yet. Regardless, this lead to a frustrating couple of hours trying to figure out how to put the whole thing together. In case you've not seen it before (in which case, read my earlier review of the whole kit), Senfu provide a single water-jacket design, but provide for it's use on a wide variety of CPU's by including different mounting clips in the kit. It was hard to tell if "Naked Athlon" was included in that range of CPU's in the original kit due to the very poor documentation, but Senfu included a mounting plate that seemed to be shaped to exactly fit on the core and cache chips of such a CPU. I spent some time trying to mount the unit onto my denuded 950-core Athlon and failed - so did Dan Rutter of Dan's Data, his attempt and eventual brute-force solution is detailed here. So, when the NEW kit arrived, I spent the aforementioned frustrating time trying to make the old plate work with the new kit. Then I figured it out.. the old plate, despite being temptingly well-shaped, is just a red herring. You use it with the Senfu kit on Pentium3's, and that's it. So, without any further delay, I present a photographic manual of how to attach the damned thing to a naked Athlon:

1. Screw 4 of the nuts onto the shorter-threaded end of the 4 pins. Slide these through the Athlon's PCB (existing holes!) so that the nuts are resting on the back of it. I used some cardboard motherboard spacers because I'm paranoid. They come with the main Senfu kit, but not this specific naked-Athlon kit.

2. Flip the assembly over (having a third hand is useful at this point), rest the PCB on the 4 pins, place the Senfu water-jacket (from the main kit) onto the core so that the pins don't get blocked by the screws holding the jacket together. Of course, you have already lapped the jacket and put a thin coat of thermal paste on, haven't you?