Spring/screw cooler mounts

[britain4]

Got a cooler I want to mount and came with some screws/springs to fit it and I have no idea how they work lol

They come packaged like this

And as far as I can tell the only way that makes sense to fit them is like this



With the screw tightened onto the PCB with the nut at the bottom and then the springs in between the thumb screws and cooler bracket?

The screws only came with 2 washers each - if that’s how it fits I will have to pick up some more washers as there should be 3 per screw. M

Now realised it’s probably supposed to be different from my pic and that the PCB is supposed to be tightened with the screw and nut with the 2 nylon washers, but the spring nearly pulls through the hole in the bracket when you tighten it with no washer on so will probably throw some on there

Am I correct there before I mount it wrong and screw my cards/CPU up lol?

 

[britain4]

I take it that's a very cheap waterblock , save yourself a lot of aggro and get something better with a less deadly mounting mechanism.

Lol, yes it is a very cheap water block but I just wanted to confirm how the mounts work. If I fit it and it’s no good I’ll swap it for a better (universal) one. (Not worth investing in a full cover one for my cards)

 

[britain4]

Thats a very old way of mounting a block. Put a fibre washer on the bolt then put the bolt through from the bottom of the board/card. Put the other fibre washer on next so you have a pair of them sandwiching the motherboard/GPU then the nut goes on. Tighten that up but not so tight to damage the board/card. It's job is to stop the bolt from spinning when you tighten or loosen the knurled nut when fitting/removing the block. Next is the block then the spring and then finally tighten the knurled nut to seat the block. Go from one corner to the diagonal opposite and tighten a bit at a time. In the end you should have Bolt>Fibre washer>Motherboard/GPU>Fibre washer>block>spring>knurled nut.

If this is for your 780ti's then you are going to have to do something for the vrm's. I had a EVGA GTX780 FTW with a core only block and ran into some big problems trying to keep the vrm's cool. In the end I bodged my own block together just for cooling the vrms. It was cheap, looked ok and worked a treat. Before that I tried several designs of copper heatsinks that I made from various old low profile cpu coolers which while they were better than the basic stock vrm heatsink still had the vrm's getting toasty without sticking a fan over them.

Wow thank you for that, that is extremely helpful. I might put some extra washers between the spring and block to stop them pulling through then. Almost had it right lol.

Yes I was aware of the VRM issue, I like the idea of a separate block for them. How did you go about doing it, you don’t have any pictures of that by any chance do you?

My plan for the VRMs was to try something similar to what this person has done

Which uses the stock fan and cooling plate and pulls air through the heatsink attached to the VRM plate, do you think that would be sufficient?

 

[britain4]

That would work...

This is superb info thank you. I’ve seen the Corsair things and wasn’t awfully impressed with what nearly £40 buys you.

That’s a great idea making a custom base plate for it and sounds really worthwhile in terms of VRM temps. Sadly I can’t find anything cheap enough that’s comparable - only the generic square blocks with fixed fittings and some south bridge blocks that could be made to fit. Unfortunately they are only about 40mm across so I’m not sure if that’d be enough to cool all the VRMs if I fitted it to a copper plate in the middle. I could however put some biggish heatsinks on the part of the copper plate not covered by the block and then hopefully even the VRMs at each end would be covered by some combination of water and air cooling...

Got me thinking now lol

 

[britain4]

Yeah I can see the reasoning. I guess worst case if I couldn't find any cheap ones and I bought the two for £30 then I could probably transfer them over to a future card.

I'm just conscious that the cards I have aren't worth spending any money on parts I can't reuse. Don't mind getting some better universal GPU blocks if the cheap ones turn out to be no good (although they look perfectly fine) but I'm definitely trying them out first.