Put it in last night, replacing the stock, relatively a petite AMD
cooler for an eight-core.

Pretty substantial, nonetheless, for their base EVO model: consisting
of metal backplate, some offset posts for the backplate, and a
cross-member to secure the cooler to four posts. Clip the fan on the
fins and it's ready. Included an extra two clips for optionally
putting on your own extra, in a dual-fan config.

The cross-member screws seem the only problem. Burying them into the
posts, serving to secure the base heatpipe into a mate to the top of
the CPU, there's a fair leeway left over for torque. I went by feel,
what felt to me nice and tight, and not to the end of the thread
travel, probably, within design allowances. It wouldn't presumably
crush and crumble the MB into broken pieces of layer PCB. I'll take
their word on it -- from the included instruction sheets, illustrated
like a comic book without any textual balloons -- and settle for the
results.

Dropped temps about 10 degrees F ambient, with extreme loads showing
15 degrees improvement. Loading a thousand audio codecs, queued and
spread across all eight cores, with the stock cooler, began to level
out at 144 F, though still potentially rising, when I shut it down
after a couple minutes and a quarter or less the way through. Same
thing with the EVO settled down to 130 F, maintained at halfway
through for four minutes. (Also suspect the PWM aspect kicked in and
it was running maybe an eighth faster -- around 2 to 2.5K RPM.)

Also updated all my sensor software. ...Surprised to find my old
quadcore Intel q8200, I'd previously been misreading, actually runs
hotter under the same stress loads, with a very similar cooler, than
the octal.

$25 is worth it, good stuff, which is why Cooler Master pretty much
has the market cornered for the money. Still...$20 on a sale would be
just peachy for that class of cooling. Added assurance and security,
hopefully, for long haul.