CPU Surgeon

I had an interesting Monday. My CPU has been running into some heat issues when under load if it is really hot in the house lately, so I went out to buy an upgraded heatsink. As I built my box myself, I knew I didn't have much in the way of room and some of the heatsinks available are huge. Thus, I went with the smallest model I could find.

My first problem occurred as I removed my existing stock heatsink. It came out very easily, but the processor came out with it. This was because the thermal compound between the two was cool and acted as superglue. There was absolutely no chance of separating the two in their current state. A quick google search later, and I learned that I had a bunch of options available. Long story short, I ended up getting the two apart by blowing hot air with a hair dryer into the heat sink, warming the thermal compound.

Unfortunately, upon attempting to reseat the processor and then install the new heatsink, I ran into worse difficulties. The first was the realization that the new heatsink wasn't going to fit. I have four DIMMs of RAM installed and I would need to remove one of them to make room for the new cooling, which wasn't an option. Given it was the smallest available, it really makes me wonder - my motherboard is a very standard model, so just how the hell do the people designing the cooling systems expect consumers to actually be able to use their product? At any rate, the next difficulty was that my processor wasn't seating properly, due to some bent pins that I assume got mangled when it was unceremoniously ripped out of its socket along with the heat sink. Now if you're familiar with processors, you know that repairing bent CPU pins is at best a dangerous game - after all there are 938 pins spaced over an area about a third of that of a credit card. After some hard work using a good pair of tweezers, I managed to straighten the seven or so pins enough that the CPU seated properly. Even better, the damn thing works, and is running cooler than before. I imagine the cooling is for two reasons: some of the (better quality) thermal cooling paste from the new heatsink transferred when I attempted installing it, and a lot of dust ended up being removed from case fans and the old heatsink itself (when it was exposed to the hair dryer). All is well that ends well I guess.