Clearance for reorienting NH-D15 on Motherboard

[dpetrela]

Hello everyone,

I have questions about the clearance for reorienting my NH-D15 from having the air flow horizontally to having the air flow vertically. My NH-D15 is mounted to a ROG STRIX Z490-E and the obstacle is two sticks or Ripjaw V ram. When oriented with horizontal airflow, I can only place one fan on the CPU cooler (In between the two heatsinks) If I was to place the second fan on either the front or the back of the cooler, the fan would either interfere with the RAM or the plastic cover for the IO components of the motherboard. I was wondering if anybody with the same setup had tried to reorient the heat sink 90 degrees so that the second fan could be placed without interference. When I have a look at the cooler, it seems like the heat pipes might strike the ram if I reorient it this way but I am unsure. I will attach pictures. Please leave any suggestions. I am considering getting a smaller fan to attach to the front of the cooler but I do not know what will fit the fan brackets that come with the cooler.

[tkitch]

That RAM looks short enough to clear the fan.  

You don't have to push the fan all the way down, they have some vertical wiggle room on the HSF

[Kilrah]

Duplicate thread removed.

 

If you rotate the HS the "now bottom" face will likely almost touch the GPU backplate and be obstructed by it, might not result in better performance.

[dpetrela]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Duplicate thread removed.

 

If you rotate the HS the "now bottom" face will likely almost touch the GPU backplate and be obstructed by it, might not result in better performance.

I was worried about that as well, thank you for the input.

[dpetrela]

11 minutes ago, tkitch said:

That RAM looks short enough to clear the fan.  

You don't have to push the fan all the way down, they have some vertical wiggle room on the HSF

Thank you for the speedy reply, please stand by for a moment I took a photo from a different angle to give you a better idea of the interference that's going on. I will post a second reply to you comment when it comes in.

[dpetrela]

17 minutes ago, tkitch said:

That RAM looks short enough to clear the fan.  

You don't have to push the fan all the way down, they have some vertical wiggle room on the HSF

Here is the photo, this is a top down view with the motherboard on the right side of the picture. I apologize for the poor quality but I have added some lines to try to indicate what is going on. The red line indicates how much the RAM sticks out from the motherboard. The purple line shows how close the fan currently mounted on the cooler is to the motherboard. Since the Fan's line is to the right of the RAM's line, there is an interference. Although your solution of mounting the fan farther away from the motherboard is the most elegant (as it doesn't involve any kind of modification), I have unfortunately built myself into a corner because there isn't enough space in the case to allow this. The fan would hit the tempered glass side of the case before it would be far enough to clear the RAM.