LGA 771 - Can't find cheap heatsinks/coolers

cinaed666 · December 7, 2015

Hello everyone!

Linus' dirt cheap 8-core pc build on the Xeon 5400-series platform has inspired me to go down the same road. On a really, really tight budget of about 100€, I was able to score a Supermicro dual-cpu board, a couple of Xeon E5430's, 16GB FB-DIMM ram, a case, a 650W sweex PSU, and a 500g Seagate harddrive. I've also got an MSI R7950 that may be resurectable, and a bunch of casefans that were donated by a friend.

Having all of this, I was set... or so I thought. Getting my hands on coolers for the LGA771 platform where I live (Belgium) has proven to be a very hard task, if I don't want to spend more than I did on the rest of the build. Amazon isn't really an option here, and ebay seemed a quite expensive option, especially with most of the offers coming from the US, which would add quite a bit of shipping.

Now, does anyone have any ideas/tips towards getting two cheap ones? I'd be quite happy to get the 1U passive heatsinks, and putting a casefan on them, but even this seems to be best-case scenario at this point. I can get my hands on 775 coolers and the like, but they seem much too bulky, and the cooler legs aren't even close to lining up.

Is there another socket type which has compatible coolers/heatsinks, perhaps? They way my motherboard is laid out, those dell poweredge heatsinks wouldn't fit in my (Mid-tower ATX) case.

Thanks in advance.

Pandora · December 7, 2015

zip ties bro. i was going to pick up some CM t2's and zip tie it.

KemoKa · December 7, 2015

zip-ties. 771 be a weird-ass socket with very strange mounting holes.

But damn, that motherboard though... You could install one of Wendel's fax modems in that thing

cinaed666 · December 7, 2015

If I were you first I would try getting ahold of some 1U passive heatsinks then zip-tying (of gluing) fans onto the heatsinks.The problem here is that LGA 771 heatsinks don't use a very common socket-mounting configuration, so it would be very hard to find compatible heatsinks. You might be able to zip tie some cooler master heatsinks on it like this one:

http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/cpu-air-cooler/hyper-tx3/

Just remove the plastic clips on the heatsinks and you may be able to do that.

zip ties bro. i was going to pick up some CM t2's and zip tie it.

It seems like zipties are the way to go. I've got a couple of older 775 (?) box coolers laying around, I'll probably have a crack at removing the legs and ziptying them once my Xeons come in the mail. Seems like the heatsinks will be pretty close together, though.