Getting a new HSF, but still confused on some aspects. Some insight would be appreciated!

Heya R_1.

Thanks so much for the advice! Yer awesome :]

I honestly have absolutely no clue what model heat sink I even have. Its just a rather cheap clamp-on Thermaltake. I even looked at a SS I took of the store page I got the thing in and they listed it as a very vague name. Something like Thermaltake Cooler or something like that. I tried looking on the fan sticker but no luck there either.

And nah, the heatsink I was using didn't seem to throttle my CPU at all, which is weird. I'm gonna go ahead and give some insight into the background of the problem. Feel free to skim past if yah wish.

A few days ago, HWMonitor and Speccy atarted reading incredibly high temperatures while I was gaming.

Just to give an idea, I was going from 60c during load before the issue, and would never go higher than 63 even after 6 hours of play. Then this happened and I got to as high as 80c in under 3 minutes.

Now, these might not be entirely correct, as I've gotten reports of HWM and Speccy being off for my particular CPU. But even if their values were wrong, they were still consistant. And I could feel a large amount of extra heat from my case.

Strangely, I checked inside my PC as these temps were happening, and my CPU fan was still working.

But, During troubleshooting, I had rebooted my PC only to notice my CPU fan had stopped spinning as well as getting a CPU fan error on boot up. So I figured my fan was just on its last legs, and thats what caused the odd rise in temperature ranges.

Finding it odd that despite the extra heat I wasn't throttling, I checked to make sure it wasn't the motherboard's pins themselves self dying by swapping the case fan and cpu fan ports around, and the case fan spun for both ports, but the CPU fan did not. Only other explaination is a bad power supply giving too much volts or the fan was struggling. So here I am testing culprit number 1; the fan :].

The only reason I'm replacing the heatsink entirely is because A. it's cheap anyway and B. It's good experience.

I've only just recently got into building PCs, and I'm still a novice to the point that I don't feel comfortable going as far as removing the mother board and adding a new bracket system for screw or bolt sinks.

I wanna take my experience with it all one step at a time. I can do most other things rather comfortably. Installing new memory, a grapics card, hard drives, PSUs, ect. But I wanna get a feeling for how to deal with the more basic sinks for the moment.

I'm not an enthusiast or overclocker anyway, so a clamp model should be enough for me.

EDIT: Actually, I might be missing something but are you sure those two sinks yah linked me to are clamp ons? They look screw mounted.

I wouldn't mind trying em as long as I didn't have to go through the effort of yanking out my mobo, but yeah my current sink set up is just two metal clamps that grab onto a braket around the CPU area, then pressing down a lever to tighten the clamps.

Those models seem to completely lack that method of instal, and instead seems to use screws. I'm just not sure they'd fit without alot of messing about with the mobo. Keep in mind; I wanna get experience installing the clamp style sinks before I try anything like bolts or screws.

Hey again R_1.

I managed to find a screenie of my heatsink. Im almost certain its my exact model. Down to the lack of a 4th pin, showing yah how stock this thing actually is .

Here it is. Note that it looks radically different compared to the ones you showed me.

The clamps on the models you showed me look really different. Here's a video of how I'd go about installing my current heatsink type. I'm 90% sure the one in the video and the one I current have are the same type, just not the same manufacturer.

Now it doesn't seem like I could use either of those models without serious modification of the mobo brackets. But if you can confirm that I don't need to do that, I'll trust you on it! You know better than I :]

Heya!

I live in the US! I think I might have just misunderstood the classification of the sinks here. My heatsink doesn't seem like it mounts anyway like the two shown above. Mine uses little metal tabs on the side of the sink that clamp onto a plastic bracket thats around the CPU area, then ended by pulling a lever down. I posted an image and video above.

So sorry if this caused any confusion! I just don't wanna rush out to buy a sink only to realize I have to go through alot of difficulties removing the mobo and bracket and what not.

Oh okay!

So sorry for the confusion. You've both been a big help :].

Gonna do a bit more looking into the installation process of those sinks before purchasing, but I've learned alot.

Cheers again!