Chatter Of The Squirrel

Because I Can - Crack open an AMD64 Processor

June 4, 2008 on 5:45 pm | In Me! | 1 Comment

Before:

After:

What just happened?

That’s my AMD64 3200+ processor. More accurately, the small turquoise coloured square is the piece of silicon that IS the processor. There’s a huge piece of metal glued to the top of the silicon core, that’s the heat spreader. Protects the fragile silicon, and makes it safer and easier for users to install the insanely huge CPU coolers needed to keep the CPU from burning up.

But that means there’s an interface between the core and the heatspreader (with a layer of grey gunky thermal grease), and there’ll be a second interface between the heatspreader and my choice of CPU cooler.

So, I tossed the CPU into the freezer for half an hour. Freeze the black rubbery glue a little, possibly making it easier to cut. Then I slid a razor blade under the heatspreader, and carefully cut around the edges. From the picture above, you should estimate how deep you need to cut to get all the black glue, WITHOUT injuring the tiny rectangular bug-like thingies.

Take care not to slice into the green circuit board either.

To make it safer, cut a rectangular piece of cardboard, fold it, and cover the outside edge of the razor so you don’t cut yourself.

After slicing all the way around, I wedged a larger blade into a corner, and pried the whole heat spreader up.

Cleaned away the grey gunk on the core with alcohol. Smeared Arctic Silver on it. Mounted it. Put my huge Thermaltake Beetle cooler on top.

See, now there’s only one interface between the core and the cooler, and with Arctic Silver in between. The CPU should be able to run cooler now. Hmm… If only I had taken some baseline temperatures of the before and after.

Ah well.

Just something that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. And now that the proc is depreciated, it won’t be that painful if I bungled the operation.

Other things to be wary when attempting this:

Make sure that your CPU cooler will be able to contact the core evenly and not be obstructed by the CPU socket on the motherboard. Removing the heatspreader reduces the profile of the CPU by a LOT and it’s now lower than the socket. You can always slice / sand away the offending part of the socket if necessary.

And if you’ve got some scraps of neoprene material lying around somewhere, cut 4 small pieces and stick them to the 4 corners of the processor, just like how the old K7 processors used to look. This might reduce the risk of you crushing the heatsink unevenly and crunching the fragile core.

Also, this works with the non X2 processors with S-939 sockets. The newer AM2 sockets (940 pins) or the X2 (dual core) processors are not interfaced by the wimpy grey gunk. Apparently a lead solder is used to interface the core and the heatspreader. Which should make for very good heat transfer already. Furthermore, the solder will make it difficult to pry off the heat spreader after cutting the glue. I’ve heard that you can burn (with a flame / soldering iron) the heatspreader to melt the solder a little so that you can pry the heatspreader off.

But that’s not something I want to attempt with my other AMD64 X2 processor. I’ll leave that to those who are more ‘hardcore’.

WinXP’s memory problems

June 4, 2008 on 10:39 am | In Tech | No Comments

Operating systems based on Microsoft Windows NT technologies have always provided applications with a flat 32-bit virtual address space that describes 4 gigabytes (GB) of virtual memory. The address space is usually split so that 2 GB of address space is directly accessible to the application and the other 2 GB is only accessible to the Windows executive software.

Here’s a reason why you installing too much RAM is useless when you’re still running Windows XP. Haven’t really verified this. Gotta check it with Kidd when I see him next. Haha… Won’t he regret not building an AMD64 X2 machine like I did.

Yarr, I have random drivers problems with running 64-bit Windows… But I’ll always know that I have the option to use more RAM, if I ever run anything that needs that much RAM…