Introduction

As some of you may already know we received a Senfu Water Cooling rig and its still sitting in the dusty TweakTown Garage™ waiting from some reviewage... We decided we would attempt first to remove the heatsink of my Intel PIIIa... I’m pretty sure we did it in record timing... Below I’ll quickly run you through how to quickly and easily it is to remove the heatsink/fan of a PIII chip.


Preparation

You may think removing the heatsink/fan is hard... although its quite simple, you will need a few tools before we start.
1) Flathead Screw Driver
2) Pliers
3) Common sense (wish I had a bit of that sometimes)
4) Patience
5) Flat Surface to work on

Once you have the above stuff in your grips, we can move onto the next step.


Removing The Heatsink

As I have said above, removing the retail heatsink/fan of a PIIIa is relatively simple, the heatsink is fastened to the PIII core and L2 cache with 4 small ’clips’, below is a picture to make identifying finding the clips easier...


Picture thanks to JSI Hardware

Once you have identified those clips, which are located between the heatsink and which connect to the bottom plate of the PIII which holds the heatsink and the chip together. you’ll need to brake or snap these clips using a pair of pliers, don’t be nervous (there is no way anything in this step can damage the chip unless you are careless and touch the chip). There are 4 clips similar to the ones in the picture above, carefully snap (or brake) all four clips so you can loosen the heatsink off. Now on the bottom plate (skinny one with the Intel hologram logo) using your pliers and flathead screw driver slowly you will need to break the holder type clips which hold the clips in the picture above to the heatsink/fan. You need to pull (or again brake) the tops (little black circular plastic top) off the clips so you can take the heatsink off. Once those have been broken and the heatsink is clearly free and no clips are holding the heatsink in place, you can slowly take the heatsink off the chip (as well as the button plate we were just dealing with) off, now that your PIII is naked put some clothes around her and keep her safe and warm...


Cleaning Up

If you have removed the heatsink correctly you’ll have a fair bit of black plastic junk around the place, you know what needs to be done, clean up your mess, and keep your mother happy!


Conclusion

Now that you have your naked PIII ready for some decent non-intel retail cooling you can pop a Alpha cooler on her for example or maybe even get some water cooling action happening... Just remember be EXTREMELY careful once you have removed the heatsink as chips can be damaged easily, its best to keep out of reach of children (always wanted to say that) so you can keep breakage to a minimum... Try and beat our record, 20 minutes to remove the heatsink/fan...