Thermal Grizzly Contact Frame

[hoardofbaboons]

So, I decided to use that frame with my 12700KF & Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Master. Turns out the screws that held the CPU mounting assembly are about 2 mm short for the frame. There's just no way to get a single screw through into the backplate even a tiny bit without lifting the rest of the frame like crazy. 

For the screws, I am measuring 3 mm diameter and 6 mm length (without the head height), but all the m3x8 screws I see online seem to have a much shorter thread pitch, which is obvious just by counting the turns in the images. Could someone please suggest the correct screw type? Thanks a million!

[hoardofbaboons]

Well, I will just reply to myself, maybe it will be useful to others. The screws are 6-32, the naïve solution is to use longer ones (available at Home Depot in US). A more elegant solution is to use three longer screw to "pre-mount" the frame, get the fourth original short screw into the backplate, then continue replacing long screws by the short ones one by one, then finally tighten as instructed.

[Natsukashii]

52 minutes ago, hoardofbaboons said:

Well, I will just reply to myself, maybe it will be useful to others. The screws are 6-32, the naïve solution is to use longer ones (available at Home Depot in US). A more elegant solution is to use three longer screw to "pre-mount" the frame, get the fourth original short screw into the backplate, then continue replacing long screws by the short ones one by one, then finally tighten as instructed.

Thanks for sharing your solution I got the same MB + contact frame and I planned to install it, now I know I have to get new screws!

btw, did you try enabling VT-X on your board? do you have the option? I don't have it while I should have it with my 12900k

[hoardofbaboons]

2 hours ago, Natsukashii said:

btw, did you try enabling VT-X on your board? do you have the option? I don't have it while I should have it with my 12900k

My understanding is that virtualization is enabled by default and there's no way to disable it.

[Natsukashii]

saw something like that too but my android emulator, ldplayer cannot find it and same for virtualbox

[hoardofbaboons]

12 hours ago, Natsukashii said:

saw something like that too but my android emulator, ldplayer cannot find it and same for virtualbox

Just finished my build with a friend, will have to double-check this.

A word of warning regarding this motherboard and the contact frame: it was a bit of a nightmare. Using long screws to make the original ones work turned out to be a good idea, but the amount of fiddling was a bit crazy, maybe because we wanted to be super-careful with this motherboard. In the end, the thermals seem reasonable with a Noctua cooler, but I didn't do any stress-testing. Overall I'm not sure if the youtube hype was all that warranted.

[Natsukashii]

5 hours ago, hoardofbaboons said:

Just finished my build with a friend, will have to double-check this.

A word of warning regarding this motherboard and the contact frame: it was a bit of a nightmare. Using long screws to make the original ones work turned out to be a good idea, but the amount of fiddling was a bit crazy, maybe because we wanted to be super-careful with this motherboard. In the end, the thermals seem reasonable with a Noctua cooler, but I didn't do any stress-testing. Overall I'm not sure if the youtube hype was all that warranted.

I might try others contact frame as they where tested to be usefull too since yeah the thermalgrizzli seems to be the least easy to install one

[hoardofbaboons]

5 hours ago, Natsukashii said:

I might try others contact frame as they where tested to be usefull too since yeah the thermalgrizzli seems to be the least easy to install one

Good call. In the end, I have no idea if it improved things much. I haven't checked any thermals under stress, the only thing I know is that my Cinebench R23 multicore score is 22931, which is a tiny bit higher than what they have on cpumonkey. 

[hoardofbaboons]

And here is a snap of my thermals during the cinebench R23 multicore test.

[hoardofbaboons]

Just to quickly follow up, windows 11 does think that virtualization is enabled here.

[Natsukashii]

On 10/16/2022 at 11:00 AM, hoardofbaboons said:

Just to quickly follow up, windows 11 does think that virtualization is enabled here.

Yes same thing for me but when I use intel utility it says it isn't enabled

[hoardofbaboons]

On 10/28/2022 at 5:21 AM, Natsukashii said:

Yes same thing for me but when I use intel utility it says it isn't enabled

The only thing I am able to see in BIOS F20b is the VT-d setting when you switch to the advanced mode. Disabled by default.