Escaped a bit of a situation

zeppelin`

zeppelin`

zeppelin`

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15 Oct 2008
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153
Well, travelling home from uni by car, transported pc in large padded suitcase, set up rig here a few days later. powered up and noticed fan noise was loud and was obviously at full rpm. everything was booting fine, post, windows but i immediately knew what was wrong and the 3 proceeding warning beeps confirmed my fear. i switched off pc before motherboard had the chance to shut down. i cracked open case and low and behold the heatsink was half off. i was stupid not to remove it for the journey (but its always been fine in the past). since pc didnt auto shut down, i knew cpu musnt have exceeded the max ~80C or not for very long, but was still worried i fried my cpu.

i bent the pins of the arctic freezer 7 pro back into place with plyers and forced it in (hopefully securely) and booted up. everything seems fine but i am asking u guys if u think i may have done any underlying damage, and wether i should replace my cooler for a proper one with backplate. I find myself quite lucky because if the second 2 pins came out it would have crashed straight into my 4850.

either way the moral of the story is; push and pull heatsinks = bad. buy a backplate cooler! (or be sensible and remove heatsink before transporting)
 
thats what happened in my last rig :(

my heatsink pulled the amd 3800 right out of the socket, bent all the pins and snapped some off, tore the socket on the motherboard to shreds and landed on my gpu, only and ati x800xt (back in the day haha)

Luckily didnt damage the gpu!! but had to get a new mobo and processor

God that seems like yesterday but was at least 3 years ago!

repaired for 2 months then sold and have been on a crappy acer laptop ever since!!!

cant wait for new i7 build next month haha
 
I read a post somewhere (this forum I think) where the guy bought the Thermalright HR-01 backplate mounting kit (£5+delivery from other e-tailer, couldnt see it on OCUK). Anyway, he was able to remove the push pins from the standard intel cooler and use the mounting bracket instead! Ive just ordered an OCZ Vendetta 2 (over 700g IIFC) and it only comes with push pins, so I bought the HR-01 to mount it with.

Long story short, it should be possible to use the backplate kit on the Freezer 7 Pro

About the damage, CPU should have throttled itself, theres vids on youtube where people remove the HSF during gameplay and it either slows the fo down or restarts, I think it's fine :)
 
zeppelin` said:
Well, travelling home from uni by car, transported pc in large padded suitcase,

either way the moral of the story is; push and pull heatsinks = bad. buy a backplate cooler! (or be sensible and remove heatsink before transporting)
Click to expand...


Surely another moral of this story is to have the PC lying flat with the mobo side down? Kinda let gravity work for you rather than against?
 
was unable to lie case horrizontal, had to go vertically standing (as it is meant to) in boot of the car. either way i have learnt my lesson, next time i will be removing the heatsink for travel or using a backplate as sound boy suggests (cheers)

anyway yes everything seems fine, have put the clocks back to stock to test and temps are fine and everything seems to be staying in place. it was a nightmare getting the heatsink pins to align up again though; took some brute force with some plyers
 
Intel chips have the ability to underclock themselves during a moderate overheat, and have a secondry protection where they reduce the clock speed to 0 (basically crashing the PC). While the thermal throttle can be disabled in some bios (not a good idea), the secondary protection is virtually impossible to disable, its hard wired into the chip. So its very unlikely to cause damage to a P4 or Core 2 Processor by a brief overheat.

Not saying its impossible to break a modern CPU, but they are very tough. In fact in your case, the bigger risk would have been if the heatsink had completely fallen off and the weight of it causing physical damage to the gpu it would have landed on, or short circuits as you had turned it on...

You got lucky that time, I would get a bolt on adaptor/backplate for the heatsink, its a lot safer.
 
I had a similar event when I changed my northbridge cooler a few years ago. Changed it to this big heavy copper effort, and my mobo only had the little rings as mounts. Anyway I was just playing around on my PC the day after I had installed it and I heard a loud *clunk* and wondered what the noise was. It took me 10 seconds to realise that the sound was the northbridge cooler falling onto my graphics card. I quickly held the power button to get the PC off and didn't switch it back on for a week until I got some thermal epoxy to stick on the original small heatsink, as the mounts were totally ripped out the mobo.

Lucky everything was ok and I got away with it. I still have that cooler somewhere as well. Good job I was in the room when it happened or else I could have been running no northbridge cooler for a while.
 
Also transport my pc around from uni and home, always paranoid afterwards as it seems like rough treatment,

I always lay it flat with the cpu closest to the back seat (less bouncing?) fron passenger seat pushed back to keep is secure.

One time I had some hard drives loose in the bottom of the case after traportation as i had not screwed them down, the thought of them flying around my case as i drive is not a pleasant image.

got a tuniq tower which has survived quite a few journeys
 
FaceplantSi said:
Surely another moral of this story is to have the PC lying flat with the mobo side down? Kinda let gravity work for you rather than against?
Click to expand...

Indeed! I had a couple of components broken from transporting a PC awhile back, good job it was cheap. Now I do this and it seems to be fine! Just wrap a couple of blankets around the pc as well and under it to keep it supported.
 
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