Mini Itx CPU cooler help please

[Chris644]

Hey all, long time lurker, first time poster here with a question on a compatible cooler. I started to put my pc together yesterday, and ran into an issue with the cooler I bought (Noctua nh-L12). The cooler would touch the top of the ram I bought, making it sit uneven. As of now I just put the stock cooler on.

Here are my components:
i7 4790K
asus z97 plus mini itx
16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 1866mhz (black)
Obsidian 250d Case

I'm looking for an air cooler that would fit, and I'm not really interested in water cooling. I don't plan on overclocking as of now (Despite getting the K, it was such a good price it didn't make sense to pass on it). I've been reading this post on the best mini itx coolers, and was wondering if any of those would work. I was especially looking at the Zalman, Silenx, or the big shuriken. Would it just be easier to return the ram and get low profile ram? I should be able to return the noctua cooler I bought, because it came missing a fair amount of screws, but I'm not sure how returning the ram would go, since it isn't defective. Edit: Amazon said I could return the ram, so would doing that and opting for low profile ram be best? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Rammy]

The biggest issue you face is that you bought a case which is more or less tied to closed loop cooling. Various air coolers can fit, but almost none of them are suited to the case. At stock speeds, this isn't a problem at all and the stock cooler itself should manage fine. In an overclocking scenario, this lack of suitability means you'll potentially end up spending quite a lot of money for not a lot of performance. Any downblower or upblower is going to be limited by the lack of a vent/fan above the CPU socket (it's a window) and more or less all tower coolers struggle with heigh clearance.

If you can easily swap the memory to make the Noctua fit then this is your best option, but it's unlikely that you'll really be able to exploit then value from your CPU+motherboard by giving it a decent overclock. If you never plan to overclock then this should work fine.

 

[Chris644]

I was actually able to return the ram, so I'm going to buy some crucial ballistix tactical low profile ram instead. I don't need something crazy, something just a bit better than stock should be good.