Part of the reason for this is that the pivot's spring gets in the way of bringing the bracket into contact with the top of the CPU plate. I don't have enough strength to press down that hard on the bracket with one hand and tighten the screws with the other while somehow holding everything in position, and if I did, I'm pretty sure I'd bend (and ruin) the bracket. In practice, when the bracket is pressed down as far as it will go, the bracket arms are all about 8mm above the tops of the standoffs, To make the screws engage the standoff threads I'd have to bend the end each bracket arm down about that far. As the bracket is pressed down into position the spring is supposed to compress to help hold the cooler in contact with the CPU.Īt least, I think that's how it's supposed to work. Then one screws the bracket's arms onto four standoffs that are attached to the motherboard near the corners of the CPU socket. To install, one holds the bracket over the top of the cooler's CPU plate and fits the pivot into a hole in the top of the plate. The cooler's retaining bracket consists of two metal arms joined into an X shape by a spring loaded pivot. Either this cooler is defective or I'm doing something wrong, but after poring over all the pictures I can find, I don't see the problem. I'm trying to install a used Hyper 212 EVO cooler on an Asus P8Z77 motherboard.