Ever have a broke nubbin?

[trents]

I sold a customer an old socket AM2 desktop computer someone had given me last year and I had refurbished. Had a first generation Phenom quad core and 8 gigs of DDR2. I replaced the dead hard drive in it with a $16 white label 250gb spinner and a fresh copy of Windows 10, which was free since it had previously been installed on the machine. Made a few bucks on it and gave him 6 months warranty. That was a few weeks ago.

This morning he calls me and said it had been running like a top but when he turned it on this morning he heard a noise and it shutdown. He lives just around the corner so I go over to his house and I turned it on and it started to boot, the cooling fan reved up and then it shut down. I fired it up again. Same thing.

I took it home expecting to find a blown capacitor or something on the motherboard but low and behold, one of the plastic nubbins of the CPU cooler retention bracket had broken off and the cooler was laying in the bottom of the case. I didn't have an old board of that vintage laying around so I ordered a retention bracket off ebay.

I have never seen this happen before! Those brackets are pretty tough! Anybody else ever seen this? This was just a stock AMD down draft aluminum cooler with transverse spring rocker style clip.

 

[Alaric]

Those mounts are usually solid as heck. I would venture to say you can grab an AM2+ cooler and yank and the mobo will break before anything else. That's a new one on me, and I have several AM2 and up set ups floating around.

 

[EarthDog]

 

[Mr.Scott]

They break all the time.
Heat weakens the plastic. A mismount or a hard jar will snap them off in a heartbeat.
I go through this on older hardware quite a bit.
Make sure the clamp loop is all the way on before snapping it down. The tab is undercut slightly.

 

[trents]

Worthless? Naw! Some knew what I was talking about.

Okay, for those who like pics I added one. The ends of the transverse spring clip on AMD OEM coolers snap over those nubbins.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

Worthless? Naw! Some knew what I was talking about.

Okay, for those who like pics I added one. The ends of the transverse spring clip on AMD OEM coolers snap over those nubbins.

I had to google "nubbin", found something that will fix it:

 

[UltraTaco]

That's hot! I wonder if you'll need a water loop to keep it cooler.

 

[EarthDog]

Worthless? Naw! Some knew what I was talking about.

Okay, for those who like pics I added one. The ends of the transverse spring clip on AMD OEM coolers snap over those nubbins.

Thanks! I had an idea of what you were talking about.... but worth a thousand worth and stuff.

 

[trents]

I had to google "nubbin", found something that will fix it:


View attachment 201130

Didn't know what "nubbin" means. Where you been all your life, son?

"nubbin" = "a small usually projecting part or bit" (Merriam-Webster online dictionary).

That oil you found, well, that's uh, for bedroom overclocking.

 

[Niku-Sama]

I hope you don't break that nubbin off in the bed room because of too many heat cycles weakening it.

and yes I have broken the retention catch for the AM style heatsinks. only while putting them on though (and relatively new at the time)

 

[UltraTaco]

Not weakening.
Conditioning!

 

[Tech Tweaker]

I have never done this myself on a S939-AM3+ socket board, seen a few systems with this problem though at a company whose IT department I used to work in though (either AM2 or AM2+ in that case) (Some stock coolers seemed to have a lot of tension on the metal load-spreader bar, so I wasn't entirely surprised by it.).

I did break off a mount point on a socket A/462 board at one point though (regrettably) when removing the heatsink to clean out the dust and replace ~10 year old thermal paste.

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

This is why I use board mounted coolers nothing to break off.