Be Excellent To Each Other

So, chums, I want to replace the noisy little fan on my northbridge. I've got a Zalman heatsink thingy and took some isopropanol and ethanol from work so I could use one of them to clean off thermal paste - thing is I don't know which one would be better to use (I'm thinking the isopropanol) and whether to use it neat or diluted (I forgot to bring back any distilled water if that matters).

Do I just dab it on with a cotton bud?

Tips and things would be much appreciated, there must be people here that have done this sort of thing more than me (never).

Ta.

Asus A8n-e and a ZM-MB32K if anyone wants to know.

Little dab of isoprop on a tissue will do the trick.

Nice one, ta. That was the sort of thing I was expecting. Shame I have to take the whole motherboard out to get to the push-pins and remove the old fan. I did read about just yanking the little fan off but that sounds a little risky to me.

Yeah, it's an irritating part of the design, especially when you're putting in said heatsink and only 3 of the pins go in. The other won't because the whole thing's at an angle, so you have to disassemble the PC to try again.

When the northbridge fan died on my old board, it was rattling like a bar steward. Instead of replacing it, as I was going to have to pull the board to do it anyway I replaced the entire board with a passively cooled northbridge. It has a heatpipe that draws the heat to the back of the PC, and a 120mm fan at the front and back moving the air. Completely silent, and runs a 2.2Ghz AMD64 x2 at a stable 2.7Ghz (overclocked) without any struggle at all.

I hate PC noise.

I didn't get round to doing this at the weekend, and I'm looking forward to doing it even more now

Getting a heat-pipey one did cross my mind, but I'd rather try this 6 quid jobby than get a new motherboard, even if they are quite cheap now. It's been an expensive week after we had a cracked rim and ruined tyre on the car.

Never, ever come to my house.

Push down straight is the key

Or just give it a damn good shove, you probably won't damage anything.

Just done this, and despite a few hairy moments everything seems to be running well, so far so good.

When I put the PC together I'd screwed the motherboard in too tightly and so some of the stand-offs came out when I was unscrewing to remover the mobo earlier. This lead to stress, which lead to the screwdriver touching the board a few times - but luckily not too forcefully

The fan was quite hard to pull off (edit: even after taking out the push-pins) and made crunching noised which wasn't too reassuring, and the brackets for the zalman heatsink were tiny and fiddly. I tried to push it on as straight as possible but in the end had to do it one clip (out of two) at a time.

Hope I applied the paste right, tried to make it a thin even smear.

It's WAY quiter now. I'm happy it's done and I don't appear to have ****ed anything up. Also tidied the wires up a bit, now they are just kind of messy rather than spread everywhere.

Thanks for the tips BTW. I feel a bit better about messing with PC innards now. What with this done and the faulty RAM replaced, the PC should now *hopefully* run nice and smoothly

*touch wood*

Good. Thinner the better. The usual schoolboy error is to use too much. Having said that it doesn't make a huge difference anyway, unless you really smother it in the stuff.

Nadgers!

No sound coming out of the onboard sound gubbins (tried speakers and headphones). All appears to be working properly as far as windows is concerned. Not sure what caused this, other than not connecting the front-of-case-mounted jacks which I never used anyway. Couldn't be that, could it?

I had a friend at work who claims that when he built his PC, he used the ENTIRE TUBE of thermal paste. I'm not sure how his PC even still works, to be honest.

I once agreed to help build a friend's PC. When I got to his house, he'd already started but, not being the type of person to read instructions, or think things through, he hadn't realised you have to lift the lever to put the processor in the socket. So he just sat it on top. And then, with apparently a great deal of effort, clamped the heatsink and fan on top of it.

Miraculously, no pins were bent and it went on to work fine.

Turns out, it could and indeed was. The signal is sent out to the front jacks and then returned to the rear jack (that is fixed to the motherboard). Jumpers would have done the trick more easily than the fiddly wires but I don't have any.

All working now, and I have learnt something