On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 12:45:16AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 04/11/10 13:24, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Ha! Weird problem, undid the machine to take a look at the innards, and noticed a slight rattling sound. Odd, but get distracted and take a look a the hard drive. This has a yellow sticker on it bearing the legend Drive 1, and someone has written in marker across it Windows 7. Interesting.
Think about this for a while. This is after all a new custom built machine. Then move the machine around to see where the rattle might be coming from. It seems to come from the fan, which is a stock Intel fan and heat sink. Odder and odder.
Waggle it a bit, and it comes up easily on one side! In short, three of the four securing pins are not secured into the main board, so presumably the fit of the heat sink is, well, dodgy.
Those new fangled LGA Intel heatsinks have a rather horrible securing mechanism which is somewhat counter-intuitive to install if you don't read the instructions.
You have to push down the securing pins to fit them into the mounting holes in the board (worryingly hard) and turn them 45° only if you intend to release them..if you turn them before pushing them then they don't lock down properly and the heatsink falls off.
The whole operation feels like you are applying more force than you should need to so they often don't get attached properly.
I quite agree, they're difficult to really understand how they work and as a consequence difficult to fit properly. The release buttons have a helpful pointer on them indicating which way to turn them but it gives no clue as to whether that is when putting the heatsink on or taking it off.
I think it was initially designed for BTX where the heatsink would be secured through the PCB to the chassis and then quickly modified to work with ATX when BTX didn't take off