OT Fan/heat sink plastic mount.

JJKizak wrote on 4/23/2009, 5:40 AM

On my Gigabyte board GA-K8N Ultra-9 the plastic mounting fastened to the motherboard that holds the AMD fan/heat sink broke and the assembly fell onto the video card. It's a real cheap piece of junk but I am having a problem trying to find a replacement. Carving this thing out on a Bridgeport would probably cost about a grand. I would hate to purchase another motherboard. Anybody know of some kind of miracle fix?
JJK

Comments

blink3times wrote on 4/23/2009, 5:50 AM

I had a similar thing happen. on one of my boards. I drilled a small hole in the plastic near the broken corner, carved a small notch in the top of the heat sink, and took a strong little spring out of an old cassette deck (I save all this kind of crap specifically for this kind of thing), and ran it from the hole in the mount to the notch on top of the heat sink. The fix cost me $0.00 and it works fine.

JJKizak wrote on 4/23/2009, 4:51 PM

I drilled a 1/4" hole through the plastic and the back of the metal case. Got a wide head 1/4-20 bolt and dremeled the head into a square clip then cut out the plastic to make the clip assume the proper position. When the fan/heat sink fell off it pulled the processor (AMD) with it and bent the pins. Straightened the pins and squiggled the socket back and forth and installed the processor only. The new metal pin will effectively ground the top of the processor so I cranked up the machine with a screwdriver grounding the top of the processor and it worked ok. Installed the fan assembly and wondered how large of an earthquake would be able to dislodge the fan/heat sink. All's well now and the machine is happy. The Supermicro case has very thick metal compared to others. The metal pin can't rotate with the heat sink installed as the pin has a flat on one side. As Cole Younger would say, "It's a wonderment"
JJK

rmack350 wrote on 4/23/2009, 5:45 PM

Hmm. I think I have the same board, but I swapped out a Zalman heat sink for the stock one. That heat sink came with it's own mounting kit that replaces all the stuff that is broken on yours.

The upshot is that you could replace the whole heat sink kit with a custom one that includes new hardware.

Rob Mack

JJKizak wrote on 4/24/2009, 5:27 AM

Unfortunately Newegg personnel could not verify that when I queried them by "E" mail. They did not know what I was talking about. Although they put me on the page with all of those units you mentioned but the nomenclature was very vague.
JJK