I had a quick chat with Andrew over PM. He asked me to post this since I noticed this while mounting my heatsink. The stock Intel heatsink, as we all know, uses push-pins to tighten the cooler to the board. Obviously, no motherboard is perfect. One of these small manufacturing errors can mean that the board has slightly larger mounting holes, or mounting holes that are slightly off-center. From time to time I have seen boards that are bent around the CPU area, obviously because the cooler applied a lot of pressure on the board. This can either be a cooler or a motherboard manufacturing error.
When mounting the stock Intel cooler on this P5AD2-E board, it took me much, much longer to mount than on my Striker Extreme (say 5 minutes vs. 1). On the P5AD2-E mobo, it seems the cooler is much more firmly attached than it was on my Striker Extreme. From the looks of it, it seems the mounting holes on the Striker are slightly bigger as well. Also, when using push-pins rather than a backplate, it could be that the cooler isn't touching the CPU perfectly, something which is less of an issue when using a backplate. This can result in different load temperatures.
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This was a great observation by Martijn. I Have not been getting great results with push pin configurations on the whole, usually equal or +1 or 2C which I was attributing to low mounting pressure due to hardware fatigue and other factors and never relating it to MB mechanical differences that was causing a pressure issue. Something to take note of and see if we can get further confirmation.
This is the kind of stuff that we can use in our troubleshooting guide. You Guys are doing great work, above and beyond what I expected. I'll have to work out a (modest) bonus for the group when we get to completion.
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