advice wanted: attaching heatsink
 

i need to put a new heatsink on my video card, and i'm thinking of just using thermal paste with a few dabs of superglue at the corners. does this sound OK?? it is an msi geforce4 mx440

thanks in advance

ok well i did it anyway, you had your chance!!! ;-)

i wouldn't have used superglue...

that is sorta bad....to use on it man....thermal paste is good enough...

Normal "thermal paste" has no adhesive qualities and wouldn't stick the heatsink on. Thermal adhesive would, but you'd want to get it right the first time. :)

?!? superglue??? they don't have like... brackets or sumthi'n for those things? I dunno that I'd use superglue on electronics... I dunno how conductive it is, but then... it's your Gfx card.

Superglue is far too strong, it'll liquidfy too (sort of) when heated too much, not to mention that it's probably left white marks on the heatsink and GeForce card.

well i don't care too much about the card anyways, it's not all that great. so far it seems to be ok. i just used a tiny drop in two opposing corners with a blob of thermal paste in the middle. the sink is getting plenty warm and is not falling off yet so...

if i was going to do it right, i would have probably drilled some holes in the sink so i could bolt it onto the card through the mounting holes, or have bought some arctic silver adhesive

If you never plan on removing the heatsink, you'll probably be OK. Obviously you would never want to do that with a CPU.

I have used a similar method with the chipset on my board. The manufacturer used double-sided tape to attach the chipset heatsink. I replaced the tape with Arctic Silver (very very sparingly) and two dots of super glue.

superglue isn't conductive , however it will get extremely brittle under lots of heat and break down, so the heat sink might fall off and cause your GPU to fry or short (if it needs a heatsink and the sg is the only support method) modern SGs have been treated to withstand heat so it will depend on the amont of heat generated and the type of SG.

Why didn't you just use thermal adhesive? I mean, that's what it's for.

I'm not sure if you are asking longjohns or me.

It was a cheap board ($50), cheapsink was very light weight, and I didn't have any adhesive. I used what I had on-hand. :)

I agree that thermal adhesive is the ideal solution.

i was impatient and the computer store i went to didn't have any.

Get the Arctic Silver adhesive thermal compound.

I've been there. The store is closed, the internet doesn't have instintaineous delivery. What's on hand, must do the job.