Cautionary tale: installing Antec A450 FRGB cooler on…
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Cautionary tale: installing Antec A450 FRGB cooler on Intel
Hope this is appropriate for this sub: it's an experience I had building today rather than an advice request, but I think it is useful information for other builders.
I was upgrading an inherited PC for my sons and decided to swap out the Intel stock cooler for a quieter tower cooler. A local store had the Antec A450 FRGB cooler for a low price, so I opted for it. For Intel mounting, it comes with a rather flimsy ABS plastic backplate with four threaded metal standoffs embedded into it. You are intended to insert these standoffs through the standard holes on the motherboard and and screw two rails (which you also screw to the heatsink) with captive spring-loaded screws into them from the other side of the board to secure the cooler itself: pretty standard procedure; I've done something similar many times before.
I made mistake when screwing the rails onto the heatsink itself. The Intel instructions do not discuss this and imply that the rails are already installed, when they are not. There is one picture showing the rails attached to the heatsink, but it is *tiny*: too small for a 40+ person who needs glasses to resolve. The rails screw to two little tabs that extend from the pad that actually makes contact with the CPU. I screwed them on the side of the tabs closest to the motherboard, rather than the one closest to the fin stack. As a consequence, the rails were about 1 mm lower than intended, and it wasn't possible to get the heatsink firmly enough mounted to the CPU in all four corners: you ran out of thread in one standoff before it was tight. I realized there was a problem and decided to remove the cooler and try again.
However, it proved impossible to remove the cooler non-destructively because one of the standoffs essentially "stripped" with respect to the plastic backplate while tightening it down: it remained captive within the plastic but rotated freely within it. Because the standoff was embedded in the plastic, there was no way to hold it in place from the back of the board so that the rail could be unscrewed. I was forced to cut away the backplate (destroying it, naturally) to access the standoff. At this point, I realized that the backplate would still not come away, even though I had successfully unscrewed the heatsink at the other three corners: the tightening process had turned two of the remaining three soft metal standoffs into rivets, sandwiching the board from both sides. Even after cutting the plastic away from them, too, they would not come out. I had to grab them with vise grips from the backside of the board and lever them out with a great amount of force (of course damaging the solder mask and possibly severing traces: I looked under a microscope but couldn't tell if they were still intact). I decided to discard the motherboard and use a different one for the build.
It must sound like I was using he-man amounts of force, but I really wasn't: we're talking a sedentary middle-age man turning a Philips screwdriver firmly, and no more. But because of the flimsy plastic and soft metal construction of the backplate, this was enough to permanently destroy it and render it impossible to remove without damaging the motherboard.
In summary I would probably avoid this cooler for Intel systems (For AMD, it uses the stock metal backplate, so it should be fine). Hope this helps someone.
#hardware #technology
source
Hope this is appropriate for this sub: it's an experience I had building today rather than an advice request, but I think it is useful information for other builders.
I was upgrading an inherited PC for my sons and decided to swap out the Intel stock cooler for a quieter tower cooler. A local store had the Antec A450 FRGB cooler for a low price, so I opted for it. For Intel mounting, it comes with a rather flimsy ABS plastic backplate with four threaded metal standoffs embedded into it. You are intended to insert these standoffs through the standard holes on the motherboard and and screw two rails (which you also screw to the heatsink) with captive spring-loaded screws into them from the other side of the board to secure the cooler itself: pretty standard procedure; I've done something similar many times before.
I made mistake when screwing the rails onto the heatsink itself. The Intel instructions do not discuss this and imply that the rails are already installed, when they are not. There is one picture showing the rails attached to the heatsink, but it is *tiny*: too small for a 40+ person who needs glasses to resolve. The rails screw to two little tabs that extend from the pad that actually makes contact with the CPU. I screwed them on the side of the tabs closest to the motherboard, rather than the one closest to the fin stack. As a consequence, the rails were about 1 mm lower than intended, and it wasn't possible to get the heatsink firmly enough mounted to the CPU in all four corners: you ran out of thread in one standoff before it was tight. I realized there was a problem and decided to remove the cooler and try again.
However, it proved impossible to remove the cooler non-destructively because one of the standoffs essentially "stripped" with respect to the plastic backplate while tightening it down: it remained captive within the plastic but rotated freely within it. Because the standoff was embedded in the plastic, there was no way to hold it in place from the back of the board so that the rail could be unscrewed. I was forced to cut away the backplate (destroying it, naturally) to access the standoff. At this point, I realized that the backplate would still not come away, even though I had successfully unscrewed the heatsink at the other three corners: the tightening process had turned two of the remaining three soft metal standoffs into rivets, sandwiching the board from both sides. Even after cutting the plastic away from them, too, they would not come out. I had to grab them with vise grips from the backside of the board and lever them out with a great amount of force (of course damaging the solder mask and possibly severing traces: I looked under a microscope but couldn't tell if they were still intact). I decided to discard the motherboard and use a different one for the build.
It must sound like I was using he-man amounts of force, but I really wasn't: we're talking a sedentary middle-age man turning a Philips screwdriver firmly, and no more. But because of the flimsy plastic and soft metal construction of the backplate, this was enough to permanently destroy it and render it impossible to remove without damaging the motherboard.
In summary I would probably avoid this cooler for Intel systems (For AMD, it uses the stock metal backplate, so it should be fine). Hope this helps someone.
#hardware #technology
source
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