The Phantom Lord (Thermaltake Armor Modded Water Cool)

[Methious]

Looking pretty good there, those VGA sinks on the mosfets? Hope they are cause that's all I could find to fit my board. Glad to see some one else doing that cause I wasn't sure it'd work considering the surface area is smaller to adhere to.

[martini161]

yes they are. i found what works best is if you use one long peice of thermal tape to cover all of them then they stick better

[Methious]

Asus was determined to make this a value board, the mosfets are in singles and pairs, spaced by capacitors and wander all over the place. If the thermal tape doesn't do it I might have to sacrifice the heat sinks and go thermal cement.

[kenc51]

Asus was determined to make this a value board, the mosfets are in singles and pairs, spaced by capacitors and wander all over the place. If the thermal tape doesn't do it I might have to sacrifice the heat sinks and go thermal cement.

That's because it's a 4 phase power design (on the M3A). The lower the amount of phases on the power circuitry the more work each mosfet has to do, thus increasing heat.
As long are they are kept cool and not pushed too far, it should be ok.

[martini161]

kens right, my board uses a 5 phase pwm, aka pulse width modulator. i could explain it using engineer type language but im not good at explaining it in other kinds of terms, thats kens area anyway, i just found that once these things heat up, the heatsinks fell right off. im gonna stick 'um back on today, but if they fall off agian im just going to sacrife any chance of rmaing the board, and the heatsinks, and use epoxy. to be honest with you id be sadder about losing the heatsinks

[Bio-Hazard]

They shouldn't fall off if the mosfets are completely clean, they should stick better when warm............... I've never had a Swiftech sink come off when I didn't want it to............

Best trick, clean well, warm the thermal tape with hair dryer before trying to attach them, apply where you need them and firmly hold them in place for 30 secs or more.

Making your own home made sink is the easiest method, gets them all covered at one time........

My old MSI P6N SLi-Fi

[stev]

Making your own home made sink is the easiest method, gets them all covered at one time........

That's exactly why I don't throw away any heat-sinks from tossed out computers. I can re-fab them into a project just like you stated and showed. Also, this method works well for memory on a GPU card or regular system memory modules too!

[martini161]

what bio said about the hair dryer reminds me of something the wife said yesterday: "you know you need to get a life when you need to use boiling water to get your computer working" she said that when i put my tubing in boiling water to get them over the barbs on the swifty nb block. i kinda almost maybe just a little agreed with her, but then i was reminded of the awesome temps i get

[DMB2000uk]

If all else fails, then Arctic Silver do some thermal epoxy.

And if you mix the thermal epoxy with regular AS5 (I've done 50/50 before) you can still pull the sinks off and re-use them.

Dan

[martini161]

wow dan, thanks i never knew you could do that. i might do that if they fall off again

[Bio-Hazard]

A small drop of super glue on the corners along with the AS5 also works well................

[martini161]

well, they kept on falling off so i just said skrew it, ill use these swiftys when i put my 8800 gt into the loop. what i did (this is the definition of gehto by the way) is a took a chop saw to the stock heatsink and cut the heatpipes goin to the pwm cooler, and used that. i think i really did some damage to my board though when the swifty sinks fell off again, i was trying to stick them back on with out shutting down, and when i was pressing them they kinda slid around a bit onto some resisors and some sparks flew that cant be good. but i can still boot and run cod4, but when i tryed to run bf2 off the disk it made a bunch of really ominous staticy sounds oh well, maybee its just god telling me to buy a new board

[DMB2000uk]

That is definitely an "oh crap I don't believe that actually just happened" moment

Dan

[martini161]

yeah i get those alot. the ones where you just want to bang your head against the wall for being so stupid. like the time i was going to put some as5 on my parents old computer cause it was runnin hot, so i took the heatsink clips off (this was an old socket 478 board) and when i pulled off the heatsink, it took the procesor right out with it! turns out it was attached with thermal wax. so now i cant exactly put it back in the socket since its attached to the big ol' heatsink i ened up takin a chisel and using it combined with a hammer to seperate the two. the next day i saw that compusa had a thermal wax remover
now back to this board, if i realized that what i did messed up the board BEFORE i hacked up the stock heatsink, i could have rmaed it. but noooo i had to do it before i realized there was a problem oh well, im sure itll work its self out in the end

[Methious]

Dang sorry to hear you had a sparking incident! Been a long time since I had one of those, back in the wire wrap the back of the motherboard to OC the old 386 from 25mhz to 33mhz.

I used those little Alcohol wipes they use at the doctors office (70% alcohol on those) to clean the mosfets, ran Orthos for 15 minutes to warm them up while I hair dryered the heat sinks, turned the rig off, then stuck them on with a pair of needle nose pliers. Then held each on for a half minute. So far their in there pretty good no droppers yet.

These capacitors are pretty much flush to the board so there wasn't as much risk.

[martini161]

yeah i thinks i fucked my sata controller up a bit. cause all hardrive stuff is slow now and the disk drive doesnt work at all. ill try some ide drives and see if they work cause the little chip that says : silicon image sil link sata blah blah was right next to where i got the spark

[Bio-Hazard]

Ouch, that hurts just reading about it.................. You might want to replace the board soon before it screws something else in the system, after one part goes, other's can soon follow, taking other components along with them.

[martini161]

i would but im broke looks like i wont be buying any water cooling stuff anytime soon before i buy a new mobo

[martini161]

looks like i got off lucky, my sata drives work now phew. im gonna be more carefull now.

[DMB2000uk]

If you got away with nothing broken then you are definitely lucky

Dan