Legit Reviews

Ok, don't laugh I never messed with 478 before (but not sure why they would be different than any other CPU I've ever had).

Any way, one of the Dells here at work started to wig out, poked around a little and found the plastic retention bracket for the cooler was broke. Well got the PC tore down to replace the bracket and was surprised to find NO thermal paste on the chip. just what looks like a shim thermal pasted to the bottom of the heat sink. Why wouldn't there be paste on the chip itself?

take a look..



Its made by Cooler Master

wtf happened to the base of that heat sink... looks like someone cut a hole in one and made it work... jebus

edit on second thought that looks like the thermal shim.... i'd scrape all that off and put on thermal compound.

So they have only put some type of thermal tape stuff on the heatsink?

What speed are the chips? Do they run at ok temperatures still?

What nate said about applying some thermal paste.

Dan

I will get a better pic of the heat sink in the morning, but yeah there is a black tar looking stuff holding a thin sheet metal square. They are 2.x cely's and a hand full of 2.x P4's, a Haven't had one over until this one, and that was due to the mount retention bracket breaking.

It's a quiet setup, haven't had the need to check the temps of any of them yet. I going to check a couple of them tomorrow, I'm curious now.

I think that celly's/p4's at the low 2Ghz+ were actually quite tame regarding heat. It wasnt until the 3Ghz mark till the heat ramp up became ridiculous. So maybe that is why cooling was more like an after thought with these 'sinks.

Dan

Here is a close look at the heat sink, you can see the impression from the chip and where the text on the chip transfered to thermal shim.

When I bought my Pentium 4 2.4Ghz Northwood back in the day the stock heatsink didn't have paste. Instead it had some strip that made contact with the CPU. I just cut it off an used paste. I don't know what it was but I would assume it was common practice until the Prescotts came out. Maybe the Northwoods with HT used paste too, my P4 was just a regular plain jane Northwood.

I ended up scrapping it all off and I noticed the heat sink was no where near flat. So a quick trip to the machine shop fixed that didn't even think to do before and after pic's

working on putting it all back together now, the other little oddity was the way the retention bracket is held to the board. There was no backing plate, but riser studs in the case that matched the board. I took them out and used the backing plate instead.