Plating Flaking Off on CoolerMaster Gemini II HSF

[wwswimming]

i was psyched to get this delivered by FedEx yesterday.

this is the heat sink i'm talking about -

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/...p?ProductCode=10005496

there was some green tape holding brackets onto the main heatsink.

when i removed them, some of that shiny (chrome, nickel, whatever) came off on the tape.

picture of Gemini with green tape & plating
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/CM_Gemini2_A2__.jpg

close-up of multi-meter. that area of plating "ohms out" at
1.5 ohms. my fingers are on the plastic of the probes, not
touching the plating.
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/CM_Gemini2_B2__.jpg

i backed away to get the heatsink, and the multimeter.
out of focus, just shows the (informal) test setup.
http://www.geocities.com/wwswimming/CM_Gemini2_C2__.jpg

this is what i call "defective plating".

and ZipZoomFly had these on sale for $14.99 !

(i down-sized the image files, from 600K to about 30K. i'm not sure
how Yahoo meters traffic for us non-paying users; offhand i'd guess
that it's by the day so the pictures should be available to look at
at about midnight tonight.)

 

[Quiksilver]

can't see pics. It's unavailable

 

[Fallen Kell]

I can see them fine.... yeah I wouldn't want to put that in my computer...

 

[wwswimming]

well that's very interesting, to me ... i guess Yahoo's bandwidth metering
on free accounts is by the hour.

one of my first jobs as an engineer was working for the Quality Control
manager at a Sili Valley laser company. adapting commercial testing specs
(many of which involved putting a piece of tape on a painted or plated
surface) to our in-house fab. facility.

anyway, this was kind of like an informal but very real "tape test."

as far as the Heat Sink, i "bagged and tagged it" (a la MIL-STD-130).

in a plating batch of, for example, 5000 parts, if there was flaking
plating on one part you would normally find it on a subset of the
total batch, where that subset is 5, 50, or 5000. the adhesion is
related to surface preparation.

i had to think about it more. i think you could have metal flakes
floating around the inside of your computer, if you're willing to
live dangerously. it seems like most of the boards use solder
mask, so a metal flake would have to lodge in a jumper or
between 2 nodes in a PCI-E socket, for example.

 

[*kjm]

wwswimming I got mine about 2 days ago and have yet to install it (waiting on a case). After seeing your post I looked at mine and it was fine. I then took some duct tape and did the same "test" on most of the plating and it was fine also. I then inserted the screws while over white paper and they were good also.
I think you just got a bad one.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If it required adhesive tape to remove the plating, the question remains as to whether it's going to come off anywhere else without being coaxed off. I'd inspect it with a magnifying glass for more imperfections, and then just keep an eye on it. You're not going to be pulling adhesive tape of the unit while it's in your computer . . .