What was your first experience of installing the Heatsking/CPU cooler like?

[koopa990]

I remember mine very clearly -- I somehow made mistakes of not doing the 4-corners method, which forced me to send my unfinished build to Best Buy 

 

I just ordered an upgrade CPU. I can hope this second time won't be the same mistake...

[filpo]

1 minute ago, koopa990 said:

I remember mine very clearly -- I somehow made mistakes of not doing the 4-corners method, which forced me to send my unfinished build to Best Buy 

 

I just ordered an upgrade CPU. I can hope this second time won't be the same mistake...

I remember, too much thermal paste. Something like this (not my pic)

overall went well though, a bit of thermal paste around the edges of the CPU holder but apart from that, went well

[AbsoluteWoo]

I swapped CPUs and struggled refitting the stock Intel cooler. That one that had plastic pegs. One of them broke and I only noticed when my PC shutdown due to overheating. Bought an AIO instead.

[PDifolco]

24 minutes ago, koopa990 said:

I remember mine very clearly -- I somehow made mistakes of not doing the 4-corners method, which forced me to send my unfinished build to Best Buy 

 

I just ordered an upgrade CPU. I can hope this second time won't be the same mistake...

For me it was a maintenance attempt on a prebuilt, wanted to change the paste after 5 years on a 120mm Corsair AIO (duh, don't hit me)

It went smoothly but then the PC overheated in seconds, thought AIO was dead, bought a replacement, when I installed it I realized I didn't replug the pump header

Gave the old one to my son eventually

 

[will0hlep]

The first two machines I build used motherboard+CPU+RAM combos, so the cooler came pre installed. Since getting more confident with computer components, I've installed: 2 AM4 stock coolers, 1 LGA1700 stock cooler, an NH-D15, a Thermalright Peerless Assassin and a Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420. But luckily those were all pretty uneventful installs (The last one took me several attempts cause I wanted it to be top mounted in a pull configuration, so the fans took ages to line up and half way through it became clear that the case didn't actually support an AIO of that size, forcing me to make case modifications with some pliers to get the AIO to fit).

 

My only real "story" would be the install of my Arctic Freezer 12.

 

The Arctic Freezer 12 installation happened when I wanted to upgrade my 3400G equiped secondary PC that I use for AI and traffic sim workloads, related to my research, and game server hosting. See each concurrent experiment I was running needed 3/4 threads so, as I only had 8 threads to play with, I could only really run 2 (maybe 3 but they'd run slower) experiments at a time. So in an effort to speed up the experiments, I decided to buy a used 5700X.

However, I didn't really want to buy a cooler for it at the time. I contemplated reusing the same stock cooler I'd used for my 3400G but decided it likely wouldn't be enough to get the best out of the new chip. My solution was the Arctic Freezer 12, except that came with other problems.

See I got my Arctic Freezer 12 when I was building my first PC as part of a motherboard+CPU+RAM combos with a i5-9600k. It came pre-installed on an intel board and while It probably arrived with a set of screws for AM4 mounting, I couldn't find them. So I ended up using the intel mounting screws which were 4mm longer. I tried to account for this but ended up screwing it down too far and severely bending the mounting brackets. Luckily, after I let the screws off a bit and booted the PC I found that nothing had been damaged and the cooler was doing it's job.

[dcgreen2k]

The first time I ever had to take off/reinstall a heatsink was when I upgraded my first gaming PC's CPU to a Core 2 Quad. I forgot to buy thermal paste so I decided I'd just use the stuff that was already on the old CPU. The problem was that this PC was around 10 years old at the time, so the existing thermal paste was completely dried up. Being excited with one of my first major upgrades, I decided to just scrape off the dried crumbles of thermal paste and scatter them on the new CPU, and surprisingly, it worked. It never thermal throttled and could play games all day long.

 

A few months later, I replaced the dried thermal paste with toothpaste. That also worked great.

[da na]

3 hours ago, dcgreen2k said:

The first time I ever had to take off/reinstall a heatsink was when I upgraded my first gaming PC's CPU to a Core 2 Quad. I forgot to buy thermal paste so I decided I'd just use the stuff that was already on the old CPU. The problem was that this PC was around 10 years old at the time, so the existing thermal paste was completely dried up. Being excited with one of my first major upgrades, I decided to just scrape off the dried crumbles of thermal paste and scatter them on the new CPU, and surprisingly, it worked. It never thermal throttled and could play games all day long.

 

A few months later, I replaced the dried thermal paste with toothpaste. That also worked great.

Surprising that toothpaste could handle 95 watts, that should be in the toothpaste advertisements!

 

 

 

First time I replaced a cooler was on AM2. Paste had dried and stuck the CPU to the heatsink, so I ripped the CPU right out of the socket. Had enough sense to pull straight upwards, at least!

[Caroline]

First was a 386 but I still added a heatsink on top of it, a piece of aluminium from a dead motherboard's chipset which I glued to the top of the chip with a mixture of thermal mayo in the middle and superglue on the corners, it's still like that because that won't come off, ever, at least not without destroying the chip.

Then I had a Socket 7 platform that already used HSF kits but had no issues with it, the retention mechanism was technically horrible and it stayed that way all the way up to AM3+ if all you used was the stock cooler.

[Beerzerker]

Had to remove the stock cooler on my Socket A that had a tab to one side used with a flathead screwdriver for latching the cooler in place.
Took a little time to figure out how it worked because I coudn't see it well (In the case) but once I got it off all was fine from there.

[8tg]

I went from socket 478 with dual hook locking levers to socket 1150 with the 4 push pin intel stock cooler. 
I feel like 478 is pretty easy to figure out, and when it’s wrong, it falls off

1150 I didn’t secure all the pins fully through the board, but one of the top ones was, so it sat kinda loose over my pentium g3260 for a while

still never overheated but I genuinely didn’t notice until I got a bequiet shadow rock lp and went to remove the stock cooler, and it just fell off

[8tg]

It’s also worth mentioning, heatsinks are optional, just a fan will do

But only for a little bit

[abit-sean]

Built first PC in 2001, Socket A AMD Athlon. Almost put the screwdriver through the motherboard trying to lever cooler in place. Don't miss those sockets especially with exposed core. 

[emothxughts]

It was a harrowing experience trying to screw in my AMD Wraith Stealth cooler to my R3 3200G, it won't screw in no matter what. Then I found out that I dropped the stand offs, put them back and I was able to screw them in.

[Mark Kaine]

stock amd cooler for a 3600.

 

most easy thing ever lol.

 

i also really do like my current noctua,  its almost even easier. 

 

i will probably never install an intel heatsink/ cooler... looks like a nightmare lol.

 

[Absentia13]

It's really easy. Kind of like doing brakes on a car. Sounds like complicated, but it's actually pretty hard to mess up. Things go where they fit and no where else. If you've seen enough videos you'll know that the paste application is not the heart attack people make it out to be. You can even take a plastic stick and drag it over the entire CPU evenly if you're worried about it. I usually use an X pattern with dots in the blank spaces. Don't crank it down super hard, just enough to feel solid. 

 

If you mess it up you can always take it off and do it again. 

[TetraSky]

Painful. It was back when cases had sharp edges everywhere.

[wasab]

i forgot to take the sticker off the bottom of the heat sink.

[Needfuldoer]

It was the tail end of the Socket 478 days, and I was on a shoestring budget. I had my cheap motherboard, my Prescott Celeron, and a Tiger Direct house brand heatsink that cost a whopping $10 or so. I had more ambition than knowledge, so when it came time to install the heatsink I looked at the little thing of white silicone thermal grease the heatsink came with and thought "well they gave me this much compound, so surely I need all of it". So I globbed on as much white thermal schmoo as I could get out of that little packet, then struggled with the metal retention clips while the whole mess slid around and oozed everywhere.

 

The machine ran fine for years until the capacitors started leaking, but I'm sure there was a mess under that heatsink.

[Mark Kaine]

14 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Painful. It was back when cases had sharp edges everywhere.

as someone who used to buy prebuilts in the 2000s to then "upgrade" them with a proper gpu and ram... i can assure you that has always been a painful (and bloody) experience,  cpu or not.

 

7 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

The machine ran fine for years until the capacitors started leaking

oh, yeah, there is the 2000s pc experience again. 

 

 

[UnseenUniverse]

Mine was a stock AMD cooler with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X. The original CPU for Blue Meanie! Now being reused for my NAS.

 

I remember using a bit too much thermal paste (any bets on when that ARCTIC MX-4 4g tube will finally run out? I still use it to this day lol. Both for my computers and both of my Brother's builds which I built.) and having to read the instructions a few times because the mounting confused me a tad. Honestly looking back it's a miracle I didn't break anything. Still to this day, I have a bit of anxiety when dealing with CPUs. Mostly because I can't really afford new ones 

[Athan Immortal]

Mine was 99/2000, a cooler like this (not my picture but I highlighted the retention mechanism, this is a socket A cooler). This was in the barbaric days when you'd have to jam a flat head screw driver in there, press down and angle it out to hook over the socket.

 

Oh and there was no heat spreader, it was direct die contact like the original AMD Athlon, so you were also hoping that you wouldn't crack the silicon while you PRESSED DOWN.... ON THAT SUCKER... GET... ON THERE DAMN IT!

 

Amusingly this is actually one of the better examples of this, there were many cheap coolers that didn't have the side guards, so your screw driver could slip out the side and hit the motherboard too.

 

I am so grateful for how coolers are these days usually with multi-corner screw downs, or at the very least a leaver that lets you hook the cooler on then increase pressure.

[Muuh]

When I switched over from AM3 to AM4 I got screwed by AMD and Corsair: I have a H80i v2 (also had the original H80i - but its pump died; and the one on my v2 also had some "issues" already) - and both AMD and Corsair had listed that the AM4 sockets is not compatible with cooler mounting hardware designed for the old AM3 socket.

So, luckly Corsair is happy to sell you a mounting kit for AM4 for "just" 20 bucks ...

After I got it and unpacked it I noticed: Those suckers ... it's the EXACT SAME! All my old AM3 stuff just works flawless on the AM4 - and also vise-versa: All AM4 stuff works on old AM3.

Now 20 bucks feel quite high just to learned that lesson ... which even reddit get wrong.

[Needfuldoer]

14 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

oh, yeah, there is the 2000s pc experience again. 

I still have that board somewhere; maybe someday I’ll dig it out, recap it, and look at the mess I made 20-ish years ago. 

 

I also made a “CPU duct” for the case by zip tying a couple plastic containers to the side intake fan mount. Bet it made a huge difference to that 3 ghz Celeron!

[Dabombinable]

First experience was removing the stock cooler from my second PC (Celeron D 2.4GHz+SiS motherboard), to just see what the CPU actually looked like. Had no thermal paste (didn't even know what it was at the time), and just putting it back on. Didn't notice any difference in performance, and it still ran just as loudly (the side panel screw threads were stripped so it could be heard vibrating all throughout the house).

[Godlygamer23]

For me, it was back in the Phenom II days where I had a Phenom II 840 as my first CPU in my first build, and I tried to install the stock cooler. That lever system is no fun.