Why were 2000, 2001 coolers so hard to remove?

[zulc22]

I recently recalled a few years ago I busted up a motherboard trying to open the clip on one of these heatsinks-- does anyone know WHY this clip-on heatsink style was common in any way or why it was designed like this?

Sorry to be rant-y, but I have no clue what the historical context for this is, or if it's just actual bullshit for [x] greedy reason.

i completely broke the motherboard and couldn't even get it unclipped.

spent a good like half hour trying to google this question and couldn't find anything, maybe my google-fu is just bad for old cpu coolers

 

[emosun]

Because socket 370 is based on socket 7 which was meant to have tiny no fan heatsinks with no thermal paste.

 

When you have a small heatsink the crossbar can be thinner and easier to remove. When you slap a jumbo cooler onto this old socket design it needs a thick crossbar and is a crap solution to a dumb problem.

[svmlegacy]

These coolers can be removed easily without breaking motherboards... Yes it takes some care, but they're not inherently bad. Worse than this was the exposed die with nothing to stop someone from twisting the cooler and chipping the edge.

[emosun]

this is more the type of heatsink that socket design should be using but the design was just too outdated and thus the big coolers are annoying to attach to them

[D1D01]

7 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

These coolers can be removed easily without breaking motherboards... Yes it takes some care, but they're not inherently bad. Worse than this was the exposed die with nothing to stop someone from twisting the cooler and chipping the edge.

Yeah you just used to put a screwdriver in the little hook and push down and out

[da na]

my god it took me like 15 minutes to safely remove one of those MFs from an Athlon XP pc. CPU turned out to be dead, I think it was already dead and that's why it was thrown out but I also wouldn't be surprised if I had cracked the die. Becuase wow that cooler was like an AM2 stock cooler with those clips...

[8tg]

Backwards/forwards compatibility with coolers that were used for years across multiple platforms. The original clip on design was for small heatsinks going all the way back to the 386/486 and then socket 7, where small heatsinks were super normal and it wasn’t much of an issue.

It kept going though into 370 and then amd 462 where they continued to use this same cooler mounting, you could put a socket 462/A cooler onto a socket 7 motherboard without issue, except by that point coolers got a lot larger, retention pressure was more of a big deal, etc

That’s really just it, there were good intentions in keeping a more universal cooler mounting method but intel ditched it with 478 quickly when they realized it’s flaws with modern processors, and subsequently with 775 ditched clips entirely. 
This was mainly due to heatsinks getting even larger and the socket itself not being able to support that weight. AMD circumvented this issue but stuck with a clip on design with those external plastic brackets around the socket into the AM sockets.

[ApolloX75]

............ Seriously?

 

They're easy. Just pop and twist on the crusty ones. Ones that have been removed more recently literally pop apart. Just like the video. Hell I did that one handed.

 

The bigger "tower" coolers are more problematic, but most of the "better" coolers for Socket A or 370 were still relatively low profile chunks of copper with an 80mm or 90mm fan on top.

 

Maybe I'm just old and I've been doing this for too long but it's not rocket science. I've never broken a die or cracked anything taking one of these style of coolers off, and as long as you don't pull straight up on the old ones and rip the socket apart, you're golden.

[freeagent]

Those clips were awesome. You mean to tell me when you heard that crunch and lifted the cooler only to see you chipped a corner of the die off, that you didn't like it? I was horrified lol. My chips didn't have the 4 rubber pads.. might have had one or two by the time I got them lol.. Never mind the crunch, remember the grinding sound it made?  Lol.. good times. I was new in those days.. it was rocket science lol.. nowadays its easy.

[zulc22]

47 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

They're easy.

I'm sure if you're very practiced with doing it, it can be simple to do... But a lot of other people here seem to agree on it being horribly difficult, mostly other people who only ever did it a few times?

 

Other stuff in the post is good advice, thanks, but definitely not anything that I could personally find at all back when I tried to remove my cooler (2019?)

[ApolloX75]

35 minutes ago, zulc22 said:

I'm sure if you're very practiced with doing it, it can be simple to do... But a lot of other people here seem to agree on it being horribly difficult, mostly other people who only ever did it a few times?

 

Other stuff in the post is good advice, thanks, but definitely not anything that I could personally find at all back when I tried to remove my cooler (2019?)

True, I do have a lot of practice at it. I'll give you that point.

 

But even when I was putting together Athlon Thunderbirds and XPs way back in 2000-03 (or even K6-2s before that) for friends and myself, they weren't what I'd call easy but there was no magic about them, no "special tricks." A lot of older hardware is very common-sense based and less "user-friendly." I find that newer hardware is a lot more friendly to newcomers and that's a great thing. Making our hobby more open and accepting to people who don't have extensive experience is a great way to bring new people into the fold with less chance of mishaps. But I find it also makes for big problems when people try to fire up the way-back machine and tinker with older hardware expecting it to be the same or similar to what we have now.

 

Makes us old timers chuckle a bit I guess, but most of us are always hanging around ready to show people how we did things in the olden days.

 

And it's the little things. Like labels, colour coding and keyways preventing things from being installed backwards, that kind of stuff, that make everything easier.