The AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHZ CPU comes with 4 little round black foam pads on top of CPU.......are they supposed to stay on to keep heatsink from contacting CPU or be removed before you install heatsink? I decided to leave them on and mounted a Thermaltake Volcano II Fan/Heatsink but noticed they do keep the Heatsink slightly off the surface of the CPU....Is this normal?

Leave them on. They are there to prevent you from applying uneven pressure to the core and cracking it. They will still give so when you put the heatsink on you must apply pressure to the center of the heatsink (not the edge) when installing it.

The heatsink should be touching the core of the T-Bird. If it doesnt then the temp would be unreal and the bird would probably die in less then a minute.

Does anybody know of a heatsink installation guide for newer socket processors like the new Athlons or the Pentium 4?

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Other than ours of course:

http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/00/8/socketa <-- Getting more and more out of date

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Or how bout I can write a new one next week sometime

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HAHAHA, Work's fun.
Then you put in 65 hours in 5 days. What the hell was I thinking?

I'm working on an update and the new Athlons aren't any different. The dies are still easy to crack, only larger.

We'll see an updated installation guide by next week.

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)