Today I received the shipment from K&M for the order I placed last month.. okay about a month to receive the goods is not well, but it could be worse, it was probably a problem with the recent tax changes in Germany, and the fact that I order from outside their borders.
One of the items I ordered was a new CPU cooler from ThermalTake to replace the original AMD one that was doing a nasty noise and wasn’t enough to cool down the CPU enough. So when I received the package, I come up to my home office, stopped enterprise, and put it over the table for operation. Beside an industrial quantity of dust in the bottom of the case, the rest was quite nicely clean thanks to the compressed air I’ve been using lately to clean up periodically the fans.
I opened the clip of the retainer, and tried to get the cooler out… but when I pulled enough, and the cooler got out, under the heatsink there was the CPU itself, that was removed from its ZIF 939 socket. The paste that was in the official boxed version of the Athlon64 I got transformed into glue with the heat. It was difficult even to detach the CPU from the heatsink, and when I looked at it I found that some pins were bent.
Took about half an hour to fix all of them with a very little screwdriver, and in the mean time two rechargeable batteries started losing their acid inside my drawer (sigh). When I put it back in and it fit, I was crossing even my toes. I reconnected everything, and pushed the power on button: the monitors didn’t came back up.
That was a bad sign, and I started looking at prices of 939 CPUs.. and then X-Drum on #gentoo-it suggest me to reset the CMOS. I gone looking for the motherboard manual, as I didn’t find the CMOS reset jumper, and while reading the various connectors I remembered that I detached the +5V extra supply because it was just over the clip I had to rotate… oops.
Reconnected it, pushed the button again, all gone well, and the effect is good, 30 degrees rather than 38 during video playing, 24 rather than 34 during idle, 36 rather than 42 during building.
