My Cpu fan is stuck to the cpu, how do I get the cpu out?

It appears the thermal grease is creating a bond between the cpu and cpu fan's heat sink, what is the best way to remove the fan and heat sink in this situation?

TIA

Is the cpu still on the motherboard? If so, a gentle twist of the fan usually will separate the two.

I just tried that it bent a few pins on the CPU and the heatsink was still stuck to it.

Shoot!

Try alcohol...

See if you can wet the outer edge of the hardened cooler paste, the interface of the CPU cooler and the CPU, with some ethanol. Use an eyedropper or drip the ethanol from the end of a pin, waiting a while, and applying it again, several times.

Not too much, not dripping it all over anything else, but of course in just the right place and from all directions, if you can manage it.

Then twist the cooler again, but just a little bit and in both directions.

If that does not work, try with benzine, then WD-40.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzine

Be sure to post back with what works, if anything works.

I think you are splitting in the wrong place. I would leave the heatsink on the cpu, and lift the fan separately. If the heatsink and cpu are glued, they are meant to stay, and the cpu is nearly always soldered to the m/b. The fan will unscrew (usually). If the cpu is gone, throw away the lot.

A trick to separate is to seek to get in with a blade, a narrow knife. Sometimes this works, other times it is unwise. I will trust your judgement not to force anything you want to reuse.

Most current CPUs are NOT soldered on the motherboard, they use sockets instead. Some of the really small motherboards do use soldered on CPUs (intel atoms among others).

Time and patients are your best bet.

Benzine is highly toxic(even chemists avoid it these days), which is why you need a special permit to get it in most countries. Rubbing alcohol and acetone(finger nail polish remover) are common solvents that work pretty well. Just be careful.

I think we need a bit more info on your system, like did you build it yourself or is it from a company ... like Dell ?

Usually the CPU and heat sink are only connected by the thermal paste. There is also usually no risk of bending any CPU pins at all, because the CPU has a lever mechanism that locks it in place on the mobo, until you get the heatsink off you cannot even move or remove the CPU.

Still, this is only the most common case, the way I've always seen it. If your computer is either very old or made by some company in some special way, or if it's something non-standard then I don't know what the case may be. Can you take a picture of it in this case ?

Off any computers I've ever had I could just pull the heat sink right off, just straight out away from other components (to avoid damage).

If the cooler has not been pulled in a long time or the machine has gotten hot, it is not unusual for the cpu to pop out of the socket(with lockdown still in place) when trying to separate the two(cpu/cooler).

IP(Isopropanol)is used between them.Or just twist slowly .

Patience, lazlow, patience.


I too would want to hear what system and CPU this is. The only time I've encountered a cooler glued to the chip was on an Nvidia video board.

It would indeed be good to know what the hardware is.

I've never had this happen on modern hardware; however, on old(er) PII machines and the like, I've found the heatsink "glued" to the CPU. It was like that from the factory, with some sort of "heat-transferring" double-sided sticky stuff. It was REALLY stuck -- twisting probably would not have got them apart, so I used an Olfa/Xacto knife & screwdriver

Another possibility is if Arctic Silver compound was used. As I understand, that stuff does dry hard, like glue.

Besides these cases, I agree with Quakeboy that most commonly, video cards seem to have the heatsinks glued to the GPU :|

Don't know where you heard that. I've been using the stuff for a very long time and it never seems to dry out completely, much less turn tacky or sticky.

OK, I can be wrong

I guess it's another product -- I *thought* Arctic Silver was the one that dries hard, but apparently not.

Sasha

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_s...l_adhesive.htm

.. UPDATE -- Here's the Arctic Silver Adhesive I had been thinking of. Note that it's NOT intended for use with CPU's

Sasha

Hi,

Artic Silver can be acquired as an adhesive thermal adhesive or thermal paste compound in different grades. The use of adhering cpu & heatsink for older class hardware that did not require to have large dissipation of heat was common.

If you find the need to remove the heatsink from the cpu that has been glued then you are better off just replacing the cpu and heatsink with a new one. You could then add a HSF (Heatsink fan) to the cpu if space allows. Some searching an you will still find the manufacture cpu with heatsink applied.

Artic Silver Thermal compound can tend to dry out over time. I've had to clean and re-paste the compound on a few.

I've used the 'Arctic Silver Thermal Adhesive' in the LAB when using small footprint equipment that used the Pentium Class processors. But that was when building the equipment. One shot install. Once you use the adhesive you had better set it right. One Shot!

Yes, Thermal Adhesive is the same technique used for video adapters and/or MB chipsets.