The two funny
looking widgets in front of the P7215 in this picture are Hewlett-Packard
TurboCoolers. They aren't made any more; they were made for expensive PA8000
RISC processors which pumped out more than 80 watts. A cottage industry
has sprung up among salvagers of these gorgeously machined objects.
The premier TurboCooler
packager is Montac Enterprises' Cooling
Store, which sells them as "Arctic Circle" coolers. They come
with a tolerably well designed mounting kit, and have had extra holes drilled
and tapped in them to make them easy to install on recent model Pentium
III and Athlon CPUs. While they last, they cost $US32.95 plus shipping;
when they're gone, they're gone.
Montac also have
what they call "Extreme! Cache Cooling" for the Athlon. The Arctic Circle
kit comes with some awfully cute little heatsinks to stick on your cache
RAM, but the Extreme! kit gives you two actual heatsink/fan units, not more
than an inch on a side. Needless to say, I got them too.
You have to remove
the thermal plate to mount the Arctic Circle kit, and that means removing
the clips that hold it on.
The usual way
people seem to do this is by using needle-nose pliers to try to bend and
stretch the tough, hard, springy, steel clips. Straining, cursing, sweating
and frequently frightening yourself appears to be de rigeur.
Some people use
high-quality side cutters and snip the steel. I tried low-quality side cutters;
the clips won.
Ergo, I whipped
out my Dremel. The Dremel Moto-Tool
is a hand-held mains powered dentist's drill from hell, to which you can
attach various cutting and grinding and shaping and drilling implements.
It is useful for countless things. With an emery cutting disc, its 30,000RPM
top speed makes short work of pretty much any small metal object.
I assaulted the
Athlon clips with it, and had them free in, literally, 30 seconds, with
zero exertion. The clips are held in place with little bent tabs that engage
each side of four pins that are set into the thermal plate. if you chop
the tab to the left of one pin, and the tab to the right of the other, the
clip just falls off.
If you slip,
of course, then your Dremel will cheerfully chew a slot through your processor's
circuit board. And then its emery wheel will probably disintegrate and you'll
have one of those this-is-why-you-wear-eye-protection moments. But I'm a
klutz, and if I can do it, anyone can.
A thorough blasting
with the nearest can of gunk remover got rid of the light dusting of metal
particles that were no doubt waiting for their chance to kill the processor,
and it was time to mount the Arctic Circle.
Which proved
pretty easy. The mounting hardware is included, the instructions are good,
and you even get an Allen key for the socket head cap screws that hold it
all together.
It was mounting
the Extreme! Cache Cooling widgets that drove me nuts.
The cache coolers,
and the standard Arctic Circle kit, come with 3m Thermally Conductive Adhesive
Transfer Tape to hold the fans or little weeny heat sinks onto the cache
chips.
You have to heat
up whatever you're going to stick the tape on - a hair dryer will do, but
a proper heat gun is better, provided you don't overdo it and barbecue your
CPU.
Then you peel
off the dull backing paper from the tape, stick it on, and rub it and lean
on it and hope and pray. Then, when the area's cooled off, you try to peel
off the shiny plastic backing from the top side of the tape, and discover
that the tape really, really wants to come with the backing.
Montac have a
whole page of hints on the subject of the tape. I will be joyous if I never
see the stuff again.
