Adapting a cooler for a different socket

[Dannyx]

Good day folks. Let me tell you a story, so *WARNING* long text ahead So I've got my old PC here with an Asus motherboard still running a good ol' Xeon x5460...what you gonna do ? Tech is expensive and not being able to afford it and/or not wanting to spend ridiculous amounts on virtually useless stuff, I built this rig somewhere in 2015 as an upgrade to my even-older machine which I think was like a Dual-core something. Xeons are dirt cheap and compared to what I originally had, this one was heaps better, albeit being old even back then, since I reckon Xeons were discontinued in 2010....

While it's definitely an outdated setup by today's standards, with stuff like I9s and Ryzens around, it's still......decent, at least by my standards and it's actually the first machine I decided to try overclocking on. Up until now I've always regarded OC-ing as a super-complex and dangerous procedure that can result in instant smoke and stuff and I was always advised NOT to do, but for the price I paid I thought "what the hey" and just went for it to get my feet wet as they say and quickly discovered that the worst thing that could happen were a couple of crashes and an occasional sweat-inducing black screens which you weren't sure the machine would recover from

The MB I got with it is a P5Q Premium and slapped a Noctua NH D15 on it which is probably the most expensive part in the whole rig right now, but before you start bashing me with "professional" comments, keep in mind that it can be carried over to a whole new system if I ever make such a large leap, so it's not a waste of money or anything...it's a known fact there's a lot of hate in the computer world, so let's not bring it here

I went all-out with OC-ing and got like 4.23Ghz from the stock 3,16, which although appeared stupidly fast to me who's been used to the pretty slugish aforementioned Dual Core, its stability stupidly sucked, as it's crash on me so often it was pretty much unusable - WAY too demanding what I tried to achieve there. I know there are tests which should be performed to check stability like Prime and stuff, but it wasn't quite ready for that phase since I was still struggling to get it stable under Windows for regular PC usage, so stress-testing was still out of the question. Despite numerous attempts I could never pinpoint exactly what was causing the issue and basically gave up and lowered it to a more sensible 3.8Ghz which so far appears to work. I didn't even care about tests and temps anymore, I just let it be and carried on using it as normal, come what may. Amazingly it seems to be running ok, but we want more than that, don't we ? It's tempting isn't it ?

That's why I began checking out liquid coolers recently and found some nice stuff out there, but the problem is that many of them are no longer designed with the old 775 socket in mind, which is what I'm currently on, so long story short: has anyone every tried adapting a heatsink to a socket it's not designed for ? The way I see it is as long as the plate makes contact with the die, it should be good enough. Again, I can see some people fuming right now and typing angry comments on their keyboards with their fists, but bare with me I'm not a 12 year old wanting to play some stupid games or anything - I'm more of a knowledge-seeker discussing tech stuff with others, including hacks and crazy stuff and I'm also aware there are probably many things wrong here, such as:
-cooler costs more than entire setup
-outdated rig
-liquid coolers themselves may be prone to failure more than air ones
-heat may not be the only limitation
....feel free to add more

Just like with the current heatsink, it's something that can be carried over to a new system in the future, so it's not a complete waste of money per-se.
Also, I don't plan to wreck the original mounts on the water block it comes with and drill holes in them and stuff - I'm just thinking of fashioning some metal brackets or stuff to "shift" the mounting holes from one of the supported bracket mounts to the 775 screw holes, whose sole purpose is to keep it pressed down onto the CPU. Seems simple right ? Let's leave everything else out of the discussion for now. Hell, someone might've already tried it. Thoughts ? Cheers

We'll get into the actual OC-ing and more specs a little later on.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Adapting a cooler for a different socket

u can still buy second hand aio water coolers like the antec 920 or 950. they came out at the time lga775 was being phased out but still have the mounting support for lga775.

another thing to add is that aio water coolers may not be that much better by a huge margin than the nh-d15. the nh-d15 is a pretty beefy heatsink.

also, 4.23 ghz is way too much for a 45nm quad core harpertown. a more realistic overclock for a 45nm quad core is in the 3.8-4 ghz ballpark. even my c2e qx9650 required 1.4375v to do 4ghz stress test linpack and p95 stable using a thermalright true black ultra 120 rev.c with two scythe slipstream 120mm 1900rpm fans in push-pull config. even then the temps hit upwards of 80°C which is too hot and will likely cause the cpu to degrade.

for 3.8ghz, i only needed 1.3375v and the p95 and linpack temps were a more respectable 65°C. so please do not try that 4.23 ghz overclock again. it is too much and will trash the cpu. cpu trashing is not part of overclocking culture.

[Dannyx]

Re: Adapting a cooler for a different socket

Now it's sitting at 3.8Ghz. Haven't got a temp monitor ATM, but like I said, I don't care that much as long as it's not crashing on me.

That's another thing I wanted to add: a liquid cooler may not provide that much of an improvement so it could turn into a complete waste of money. I also tried leaving as many options in the bios as possible on AUTO, which I know is not commonly favored by the OC community, but I'm not trying to break any records here

[Snayperskaya]

Re: Adapting a cooler for a different socket

I've had a Q9400 running at 3.4GHz (from the 2.6GHz default) back in 2010 pretty stable on a P5Q. One thing you should avoid is letting voltages in AUTO. Those can lead into pretty high spikes while your CPU is loaded. If you need the reference values, disable your OC, set everything into AUTO and use a tool like hwinfo to check into some of those values.

Also, don't mess with PCIe clocks. I've read some bad stuff happening such as all SATA ports dying after some minor tinkering.

[Dannyx]

Re: Adapting a cooler for a different socket

I reckon CPUz works just as well, which is why I stuck with that for the most part. I still get the odd bluescreen, but can't pinpoint it, like I said.....Memtest seems random too: sometimes I get errors, other times I don't....could be heat related on some random component somewhere just as well.