Help adding custom heatsinks to older motherboard

[UncleGrandpa]

Hi all, I'm upgrading a 10 year old computer with my son. It's just a fun little project, not going to be used for gaming besides emulators for older games and other GOG oldies. I basically bought a quad core Athlon II to replace the dual core it has. So I was watching this tech YouTube channel and someone was adding copper heatsinks to make a really old mobo cool better. I saw a whole bunch for sale at eBay, but don't really know if these are all compatible to use on my mobo or I need to get a specific set. I just figured that for $5 it's worth to try and install a few heatsinks.

Motherboard is something like this


And these are the heatsinks I was looking at

 

[Zerileous]

Are you going to be overclocking? I'm assuming they were used to cool the mosfets of the VRM. You might want to use something more like this https://www.amazon.com/Enzotech-Mosfet-Passive-Black-10-Pack/dp/B00P87G1NU?th=1. Although I really don't think it's necessary.

The heatsinks you showed a picture of look like they are sized for memory, so they won't help much on the motherboard. The mosfets are the small flat black ICs that are above the motherboard in your pic, and have 3 large traces. I count 8 of them near the CPU. There are also two near the PCIe slots / chipset, and 2 or three near the dimm slots. They convert the voltage from the PSU to whatever the component being supplied with power requires.

 

[UncleGrandpa]

Thanks Zerileus, I think you're right. Seems like these aren't the right heatsinks. Maybe I'll just get a better CPU cooler for the new CPU. It's an old 645 cpu but I'm scared it will still be hotter than my even older dual core LOL

 

[JLK03F150]

Many, many years ago I cut up RAM sinks to make mosfet sinks. Put them on with Super Glue instead of double sided tape too. lol It's nice to see you can just buy them now (Link in Zerilous' post). It might be a good idea to sink the mosfets and upgrade the CPU cooling considering the Athlon II X4 645 is a 95 watt part.

 

[UncleGrandpa]

Hi JLK yeah I will def get a new CPU cooler, don't want to spend a whole lot though. Do you know if the enermax ETS-N31 is any good? What about the Raijintek Aidos? been looking at a few coolers in the $20-$30 range. Helps that there are a lot of sales these days haha. Looking for something under 150mm so it can go into a M-atx case.

I'll keep an eye on the mosfet sinks in case they go on sale too.

 

[JLK03F150]

Others will disagree with me, but I would rather find a heatsink/fan that blows down on the motherboard instead of across the board like your two suggestions. The downward airflow puts good air on those mosfets, which gives you an overall lower CPU temperature under load.

 

[UncleGrandpa]

You mean something like the Raijintek Pallas? That one looks pretty awesome. I am considering it although these other two seem to be going for cheaper. Do you have other suggestions for a horizontal CPU cooler? I'll check them out. The problem with some of these coolers is their size, I have a 150mm max height case. Although I just realized my H7 would be fine for the small case so I could always get a large one one and swap them.

There are a lot of PCCOOLER branded sinks on sale, but I'm not finding a whole lot of info on them. Are they alright?