A friend of mine has an abit vp6 motherboard with to 1ghz piii chips. He just bought two passive zalman coolers for the board, and when trying to install them, he broke off the clips on both sockets (see red circles) He bought some arctic silver thermal epoxy adhesive. My question - is the thermal adhesive going to be enough to hold the heatsinks on (they weigh 296 grams) if the motherboard is vertical? Also - can any of you brilliant modders figure out a better way to attach these new heatsinks? Something else he is thinking of is using some of this: http://cotronics.com/vo/cotr/pdf/4700N.pdf to fill the space between the fcpga package and the heatsink in addition to thermal adhesive on the die itself. Thanks in advance for any advice.
you need the clips, the clips are for keeping good contact with the chip more than you need it to hold on the hs. if you dont have the clip and you install the hs you might run into problems with temps but i would never put a hs on with out all the clips
So - there's nothing he can do? You can't buy the mobo anymore (except for a used one on ebay, but he doesn't want a used mobo)... I figure there has to be some way to attach them. He's ok with a permanant solution (like epoxy) - this machine is on its way out. He just wants to get another 6 or so months out of it - particularly since he just spent $$ on the two new zalman heatsinks.
even if the epoxy would hold the heatsink onto the cpu, would the zif socket hold the cpu and the added weight of the cooler all by itself? the zif only holds onto the cpu via the pins. sounds sketchy at best. maybe if you left it laid on it's side with the heatsinks arctic epoxied on. i take it there are no mounting holes through the mobo
if the mobo was always flat and wasnt really moved thermal expoxy would be fine. Just depends what he wants to use it as and where.
Are most sockets soldered through the board and not surface soldered? I'm pretty sure they are (never had to pay much attention to it). If this is the case, you can buy a new socket and unsolder all 370 pins, take off the old socket, put in the new socket, and solder all 370 pins. I don't think this will take as much time as it seems. Just get yourself a solder wick.
zapho you will have to have amazing skill to pull this off as this is normally done by computer controlled machines. There is also a large chance of doing damage to the rest of the board.
