Southbridge Heatsink came badly installed.

[Mod7PCs]

Well like it says heat sink came badly installed. I should have caught it but I did not (this mistake will not be made again). I have a bunch of pictures that I will link.

The short story here is I could not even get this thing to run long enough to mess around in BIOS. After many hours of searching for a problem....ie switching out memory, taking out a video card, trying different PCIe slots and disconnecting everything from the Mobo that I could. I finally came to the conclusion it had to be a heat issue somewhere.

I knew the processor wasn't the problem as it had a properly installed Tru120. So that left the memory and southbridge. In my adventures I had my hands on the memory enough to know that wasn't the the problem. So I threw a 120 fan on pointing at the SB. Boom up and running. With everything in the pc it looked like it wasn't sitting quite right but was hard to tell. So I pressed down on it and it seemed like it could go down more in the back. I will be honest I have not messed with NB or SB other than clipping a fan to one.

When you see the pics it is obvious that it was not sitting right now I am not sure what I should do. Should I RMA the board or fix it? The HS is easy enough to straighten out. Here is another question if I am to fix should I just clean up what ever TIM they had on there and put some AS5 on it or something. Looking forward to some advice.



Heatsink on the Board

Chipset

Bottom of Heatsink
As you can see by the 3 dimples it was only touching manly on the CPU side.

Heat Sink on its back
As you can see far from square.

Thanks again folks

Dominic

 

[lopri]

If you were able to fix the issue by revamped cooling then it's a possibility. Did you measure the temperature of SB when the system was not stable? Also how did the instability manifest itself? Did it freeze or lose HDDs?

P.S. What motherboard?

 

[Mod7PCs]

The motherboard is an ASRock x58Extreme. After I got the system stable enough to load an OS and after the OS was loaded I decided that it was best that I shut the system down till I confirmed the problem. The stock Heatsink is easily fixed just a little tweak and it sits flat. I am just wondering what are the odds I did any long term damage?

Thanks for the response,
Dominic


Edit: Oh and as far as how it was acting. It started off by freezing after getting into bios. Then sometimes after rebooting it would go into a boot loop and that about sums it up.

 

[Mod7PCs]

So I realized there was no point in RMA'ing this thing. They would just do the same thing I just did with the heat sink. That was straighten it out, clean up the old TIM, put some new TIM on and replace. Then they would have tested it and said all better. So that is what I did hope it holds up in the long run.

 

[lopri]

Try stressing the south bridge. IMO it's not very likely you've damaged the south bridge, but it doesn't hurt to make sure. Usually stressing disk controller does a good job testing south bridge (copy/paste large files, defrag multiple volumes, etc.). If you have a spare video card you can try installing it on a PCIe slot stemming from south bridge and run something like 3DMark01.

 

[Mod7PCs]

Damn day late and a dollar short lol. I am guessing it was hurt because now the mobo doesn't do a thing lol. Going to RMA it next week.