ECS K7S5A Pro uses double-sided tape on NB heatsink

[CougTek]

I've been disassembling my slowest system this evening, moving it to another enclosure. When I arrived to the motherboard, I decided to check if a) I was able to remove the north bridge heatsink and b) to verify if ECS did the odious of putting double-sided tape to attach the heatsink to the north bridge. Too bad the thread title gave the punch-conclusion of this short paragraph...

I will replace it with proper heatsink compound (I have several spare packs) and fix it back with crazy-glue.

A real shame ECS still does this. The board was behaving well even with the tape, but then, why bother with a heatsink at all? The worst is that I'm sure many other manufacturers do the same thing. I thought those practices were things of the past.

 

[CougTek]

And may I add that the heatsink was a bitch to remove.

 

[CougTek]

...and removing the tape was even worst.

 

[blakerwry]

I've seen 486 processors that used a sort of double sided tape.. more like an adheasive pad. There's nothing wrong with tape if it does the job.

It's probably cheaper, easier to work with, and more forgiving than epoxy, glue, or grease.

 

[CougTek]

But it has practically NO heat transferring capability. And this wasn't a thermal pad, it was plain double-sided tape. A shame, I tell you.

 

[Mercutio]

Coug, you're referring to ECS here. Maybe some of us don't give ECS enough credit but in this particular case I think you were giving them a bit too much.

 

[sechs]

I am personally disappointed at heatsinks and fans added for looks more than functionality. My Soyo board has a heatsink and fan on the northbridge, but certainly does not need the fan (I have it unplugged from the motherboard to reduce noise) and may not even need the heatsink.

I know a number of video cards out that have fans on their heatsinks, but certainly don't need them.

 

[ddrueding]

I always wondered about the people that bought nFOrce2 mobos with fans on the northbridge. Do they think it is faster? ASUS uses a (large) passive heatsink without issue. This solution is far less likely to fail in the future, and those with fans typically have tiny heatsinks, incapable of cooling on their own...

 

[CougTek]

The Asus has worst design issues than an active NB cooling. My two favorite nForce 2 motherboards both have a fan on the north bridge, which I could live without, but they both have other features and design peculiarities I care about.

 

[ddrueding]

The Asus has worst design issues than an active NB cooling. My two favorite nForce 2 motherboards both have a fan on the north bridge, which I could live without, but they both have other features and design peculiarities I care about.

care to elaborate?

 

[CougTek]

I did at length several months ago. I do not trust dual phase voltage regulation as much as three phase regulation, especially for +70W processors. There's no 12V ATX connector on the Asus either. I think I had another bone against it, but I don't remember. The above two are very important points for me when looking at any socket-A motherboard.

I remember what a two phase voltage regulation looks like on an oscilloscope compared to a three-phase and, even with the attenuation that capacitors can do, there's no comparison between both. No dual-phase regulation on my boards.

 

[Mercutio]

I bought one because it's the only nforce2 board I can find with a coax spdif connector. Most nforce2 boards either omit digital sound - which makes soundstorm useless - or use TOSLink, which is expensive and doesn't allow for long cables.

I would be very happy if I could get a card with the soundstorm encoder on it. Even more if it had a full range of digital sound ports on it.

Sigh.

 

[CougTek]

Follow-up regarding the double-sided tape.

I tried all the solvents I had at home to try to remove the damn tape without scratching the heatsink's bottom, to no avail. In the end, I had to use a screwdriver and scrap the base to remove all the glue. This, of course, created several scars on the bottom of the heatsink, which is evil for good cooling.

So...since I had some time to spare and...a half unused 800grit sand paper sheet, I...wasted 45 minutes of my life to lap a probably not even necessary small heatsink. When off with it, I applied a thin and even layer of thermal paste (no, don't worry, not Arctic Silver, just some generic left-over) on the chipset and crazy-glued the four corners of the stupidly small heatsink.

I know it won't improve anything, but it's against my religion to put a badly scratched heatsink on anything. And I didn't lap the chipset ;-) Whatever, I might have made a collector's piece (of crap). It still is not as shameful as to put tape IMO.