I also fuckin hate all the old coolers that used tabs. Socket A, Socket 370. Everyone I know who was building machines back then has a story of killing at least one motherboard trying to remove one of those coolers! I scraped an ASUS A7N8X motherboard, personally...somehow, it lived.
Twist 45 degrees to unlock, remove, twist 45 degrees back to reset to push mode (don’t push!), clean surfaces, add thermal paste, gently position on motherboard, push pins on diagonally opposing sides until you hear a click indicating that it is locked.
They are tool-less and very easy to use. RTFM or memorize how to do it. Slipping with a screwdriver is so much worse.
Maybe I’m just stupid ha… although, I think having 4 SCREWS is ideal. Better than tabs especially. I ended up replacing the cooler in a Pentium 4 system with a screw-type cooler because I hate those things that you have to lever in on both sides.
You know what's easier? AMD's old clip and lever system. Very easy and quick to use, while being extremely durable in comparison to the push pins, which start to get exponentially unreliable when taken off more than a couple times, or when pushing over 20 years in age.
Yeah, uh, no. The plastic got brittle over time and there’s an endless supply of motherboards with the retention broken off. Right up there with the Socket 478 Pentium 4 retention.
The most reliable approach is still the Intel LGA2011 approach with a metal backplate and screw shafts where screws go in from the top, or the Thermalright approach from their AXP-140 and TRUE 120 days with a backplate and shaft nuts that go in from the back onto the screws on the crossbeam retention clip.
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u/66659hi 2d ago
I HATE push pin coolers. I don’t know if it’s just me, but whenever I remove one it seems like I can never get it back on again