Heat pipe cooling has come to the forefront over the past 18 months and we now have air coolers that perform as well as some water cooling kits.

There is room to improve things though.

For those who are using the OCZ Vindicator i will detail some simple modifications that allow for better mounting of the heat sink and usually improved performance especially when used with a quad core Intel CPU. Click the pic for a link to the product page.





Our first move is to do away with the plastic clips used to mount the CPU



Lets look at the clip in more detail.


What we are looking at doing is removing the clips completely, I have taken some pics outlining what to do here. Overall you have to twist the black section of the clip thru 25Deg then push it up off the white section. Once you have just the white sections you gently ease the top of the white clip thru the hole in the mounting brackets.





What were left with then is a bare base with no clips....


Now here is the trick to get the heat sink working better. The mounting plate is removable, it has to be to accommodate AMD CPU's, the trick is to turn the plate upside down.

Starting from the top...1st pic unscrewing the retaining screws, 2nd pic base removed and screws kept safe and 3rd pic mounting bracket remounted but upside down.







What we are looking to do is increase the gap between the mounting bracket and the motherboard with the heat sink mounted.

Moving on you are now going to need some mounting hardware, I see this locally in the UK from various hardware suppliers, I am sure the same will be available else where.



4 screws, 4 knurled nuts or wing nuts, 8 nylon washers and 4 standard 4mm nuts.

Now the most important part of the whole modification, we have to strengthen the motherboard to stop is bending under pressure from the heat sink. There are various brackets you can buy to do this but they may have different threaded holes to the 4MM I quote here, if they do just use screws etc that match the backplate you are using.

Here are some links to what you could use:http://images.google.co.uk/images?cl...-8&sa=N&tab=wi

You could also make one if you wanted, I recommend using 6mm (1/4) thick acrylic sheet and please make sure it does not damage any components on the back of the motherboard.

I used a backplate that came with a new water block i'm testing, you see the hole in the middle of the plate? This is to clear components and is most important.


If your backplate is made of metal like the one I have here make sure you space the plate off the back of the motherboard using 4 of the nylon washers. So...you pass the screw thru the backplate then a washer down the screw then push the screw thru the board so that a washer is trapped between the backplate and the board. My plate here is fully insulated so i did not have to do this...just make sure you check before bolting everything together.

So moving on the next pic shows the base hardware mounted without the heat sink attached. this should give you a general idea of what to look for as you build the heat sink back up.


Next up mount the heat sink, I get everything just seated and tightened up loosely then wind down the Knurled screws till they are finger tight. It is usually around 4 full turns on the nuts to get some good tension on the springs.Do this cross cornered to make sure you tighten the plate down evenly onto the CPU.
If you had this amount of pressure with no backplate your motherboard would be massively bent, this is why a backplate is so important.




Now all that is left is remount the fan and retest, also make sure to get the fan mounted with the right orientation.


This alone can cut 6 to 10C from the load temperatures on your CPU.

I have seen with this bolt down modification load temps drop by 6 to 8C on various motherboards especially with quad core Intel CPU's. It also is much more LAN party friendly as there is no chance of the clips undoing on the heat sink during transit as you have done away with them.

We are not guaranteeing this will make the heat sink perform better but overall during personal tests by a few of the online staff we have noticed some improvements.