[geeks] help - strange pc death

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Sandwich Maker wrote:

> so i pop the heatsink retaining clip and peek.  [it is]  but when i put
> it back together, no joy - it acts like there isn't even a cpu plugged
> in.  i didn't touch the chip though i did wrestle a bit with the
> heatsink clip; it has a fair amount of tension and i didn't at first
> swing the ps out of the way.  over all, this machine looks to be pretty
> solidly engineered, so i'm astonished that i could've broken anything
> that easily.  are socket 370 cpus known to be fragile?

Yep.  The reason for the heat-spreader on the later CPUs wasn't so much
for better thermal contact as it was to prevent cracking or chipping the
die.

Polish the top of the die as cleanly as you can get it and shine a
flashlight at it from different angles to see if you've introduced a
hairline fracture into the die.  I've killed a flip-chip Pentium 3 by
inadvertently bouncing the corner of the heatsink against the die.

Luckily for you, all but the 1400MHz/512k Tualatin Pentium 3 parts are as
cheap as sand these days.

I've even killed one of our parts at work with a poorly-adjusted heatsink.
A combination of uneven pressure and poor thermal mating caused the part
to crack right down the middle once it started to get warm.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |