The "Quiet Cubid"
By John Robinson, Edinburgh, Scotland
Posted on August 13, 2004
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Next I prepared the Zalman heatsink for fitting. I fitted the legs, nuts and bolts, which go together easily as per their instructions, but getting them in just the right place is rather fiddly especially as you're trying to think which way round to put them upside down - you'll see what I mean if you try it. It turned out I got it slightly wrong, so don't do it exactly as I did; I'll explain why later! I gave the heatsink a quick clean, and I spread some Arctic Silver over the base, using a Stanley knife blade to try to ensure as thin and even as possible a layer, to try to ensure the most effective heat transfer from the CPU.

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Now it was time to fit the heatsink back onto the board. This was straightforward, after all the test fittings I'd done earlier while trying to get the blasted legs in the right place; I just lined it up, pressed it down firmly, and gently pushed the push-pins through the board again.

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And another shot from a bit closer; you can see that I centred the heatsink as best I could over the CPU:

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That's the hard work done now, but you'll remember I got a few more bits and pieces than just the heatsink. I decided to mount the Fan Mate between the front of the case and the fan itself, next to the power converter board:

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Now it's time to get the board back into the machine, which as ever is rather fiddly, and get all the cables in the right places. The rounded UDMA cables I'd bought had 3 connectors on them, but I wanted to put the hard drive and the CD/DVD drive on separate cables, and there isn't room inside the case for any excess, so I just cut the extra off by pulling the hood back and using a pair of scissors as near to the middle connector as I could. If you modify a UDMA cable like this, keep the end with the blue connector for the motherboard end, as that's how the system identifies the presence of the 80-conductor cable. You can see how neatly the Fan Mate fits in that corner of the case. I plugged its cable into the header that used to be used for the CPU fan, because it was no longer in use.

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Then I put the bracket with the hard drive and CD/DVD on it back in, and you can start to see why I'd put the new heatsink on the wrong way round: there isn't really room for the big ATX power cable to go round it, but there would have been if I'd put it on turned through 90°, because some of the fins are shorter than the others. I managed to spread the ATX cable out a bit and make it fit, just, and I couldn't be bothered to take everything apart again, but if you're doing this, put the heatsink on turned through 90° with the larger gap between the heatsink and the hard drive bracket.

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