Modify a 775 CPU cooler to fit Ivy Bridge?

TimTim Southwest PA Icrontian
edited January 2013 in Hardware
I have a Noctua NH-U9B cpu cooler from my old pc, which was a Gigabyte P45 chipset / 775 / Core 2 Duo E7300, and it showed as a consistently good cooler in tests I have seen.

I was wondering how much different the holes and mounting could possibly be on an 1155 Ivy Bridge socket, and can the 775 cooler be easily adapted to fit it? Why spend $80 or so on another cooler when I already have a good one?

This is one of the scams in modern PC design. Move or add or delete a few pins or a mounting bolt hole, just enough so the old stuff doesn't fit and you have to BUY MORE STUFF.

But they don't fool me. Don't try to con a con man, I see them coming before they even get here with their fancy sales pitch and "oh BTW, we moved one insignificant pin one notch over and swapped it with an important pin and we won't tell you which one so you have to buy new parts hahahahahaha".

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    You're wrong. Buy a new mounting kit.
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    primesuspectMiracleManSBlueTattooRyanFodder
  • This is a terrible idea for several reasons which I will outline.

    Reason 1: The board layout contains multiple layers of circuitry. By moving the holes that the cooler fits into, the board manufacturer had to redesign the layout of the PCB layers. There is a reason this has happened, and a lot of work goes into trying to design the most compact and efficient board layouts. Don't try to drill new holes, this will most likely ruin your motherboard or other components. Remember, the interconnects for the board to the chip run all around the socket. If you break those, the whole thing is useless.

    Reason 2: The CPU packaging changes to accommodate different thermal profiles and chip sizes. As each chip becomes smaller, it has to move as much or more heat from a smaller area. This changes how the packaging is created and leads to different pin positions for the interface to the board as well as the interface to the cooler. Do not mess with this, as people with much more education and a greater amount of planning have figured out that this is the most reliable way to interface and cool the chip.

    Reason 3: None of the pins are actually insignificant. Each ones has a function and moving it one pin may allow the manufacturer to print the chip packaging easier, fix an issue with the resistance of of a circuit, other errata. The jump in pin count from LGA 775 to LGA 1156 was to incorporate an integrated memory controller and graphics unit. Hence the increase in pin count. The change from 1156 to 1155 is due to a core change from the Nehalem based Pentiums to the SandyBridge based Pentiums. Since these are physically different cpus, this necessitated a different interface.
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