Removing heatsink from old video card

[goobernoodles]

Hrm... My buddy gave me his old Dell.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of video card this thing is. I'm pretty sure its a Geforce 2 or something, but I want to take the heatsink off to see, however, the heatsink is applied with adhesive apparently.

I've tried heating the thing up with a blow drier, and thats a no go.

Then again... If I take it off, will if go back on? haha

 

[foodfightr]

Originally posted by: goobernoodles
Hrm... My buddy gave me his old Dell.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of video card this thing is. I'm pretty sure its a Geforce 2 or something, but I want to take the heatsink off to see, however, the heatsink is applied with adhesive apparently.

I've tried heating the thing up with a blow drier, and thats a no go.

Then again... If I take it off, will if go back on? haha

Hammer.... or better yet.. JACK HAMMER! Just to be sure, I'd apply it to the entire system.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: foodfightr

Originally posted by: goobernoodles
Hrm... My buddy gave me his old Dell.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of video card this thing is. I'm pretty sure its a Geforce 2 or something, but I want to take the heatsink off to see, however, the heatsink is applied with adhesive apparently.

I've tried heating the thing up with a blow drier, and thats a no go.

Then again... If I take it off, will if go back on? haha

Hammer.... or better yet.. JACK HAMMER! Just to be sure, I'd apply it to the entire system.

Um...

more seriously, you could try running the card under load for a bit (to heat up the GPU core directly), then try to remove it.

If they used thermal epoxy, acetone might weaken/dissolve it. But as you noted, it will probably not go back on unless you clean it off entirely and then re-epoxy it.

 

[Slugbait]

Place it in a plastic bag. Make sure the bag has no moisture (natch) and will not let moisture in (no holes). Toss it in the freezer overnight. Gently pry it off with a screw driver.

Simpler and vastly speedier solution: Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager->Display Adapters.

 

[foodfightr]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
Simpler and vastly speedier solution: Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager->Display Adapters.

Awww... I was hoping we were going to get to apply heat, cold, chemicals or force to some hardware.

 

[goobernoodles]

Haha, only thing is, I no longer own any running machines that have AGP slots.

 

[allanon1965]

simply google the part number on the card, or the fcc ID number, will tell you who made it and when it was made

 

[Jeff7]

Or pry it off with a razor blade. Just be careful - once I did that to a GF2 MX, and the reinforced part of the razor blade wound up breaking 3 surface mount components off of the circuitboard. But I did finally get the heatsink off (and the card actually worked afterwards, crazily enough). I'd just tap the razor in a bit at a time, until I could pry the heatsink away. I cleaned the thermal adhesive off by first scraping it with the razor, then I used a combination of fine sandpaper (think I used 1500 grit) and good old rubbing alcohol.


Edit: Oh, I didn't see that this was simply for identification purposes. Yeah, do what allanon1965 said. Much much easier.