AIO cooling clearance issue w/ ATX mobo and ATX mid tower case

Rybo · October 30, 2019

I've got an old pc that I recently installed an AIO cooler in (purely for noise control) and I had interminable clearance issues getting it installed. I don't want a giant monster of a full tower, so I'm sticking with a mid tower, and due to the other constraints I have (I have an internal disk drive and some old HDDs, and both of those solutions are usually placed in the front of the case), I needed to mount the radiator on the top of the case instead of the front.

The problem I ran into is that on the ATX motherboard configuration, the RAM is too high up on the board -- on both my old ATX mid tower case and the new Fractal Designs case I bought (https://www.newegg.com/black-fractal-design-focus-g-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811352069) to remedy the clearance issue, the heat sinks on the RAM got in the way of the rad + fans of the AIO cooler. I chopped off the part of the heat sink that was causing the clearance issue, so the problem is "solved" for the time being.

However, I've now got the PC building bug again, and I'm due for an upgrade anyways. In shopping for new motherboards, though, all of the normal ATX motherboards naturally have the RAM in the exact same spot -- and most cases seem to leave the same clearance for fans + radiators (if they even leave room for a rad) -- which, according to my experience, is not going to be enough space for the RAM if I use an AIO cooler. I'd rather not limit myself to "low profile" ram and I'd rather not mutilate it either.

So the question is...am I doing something wrong here? It doesn't seem to be a common problem, but it might just be that everybody who even thinks about AIO cooling already has a massive tower anyways (or doesn't artificially constrain themselves and is able to mount the unit in the front of the case)

The cooler I'm currently using is Cooler Master MasterLiquid LITE ML240L (https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-masterliquid-ml240l-rgb-liquid-cooling-system/p/2YM-0004-00015?Description=Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L&cm_re=Cooler_Master_MasterLiquid_ML240L-_-2YM-0004-00015-_-Product), but from what I can tell, radiator + fan depth seems pretty standard across products.