kalohimal wrote on 2020-08-08, 09:09:

Today I dug out my old Shuttle HOT-555 board with a Pentium 166. Its fan has become a jet engine. OK maybe not but it's at least as loud as a jet engine 😂.

I see two ways to deal with the problem: Either you unscrew the fan from the heatsink and disassemble it by removing the retaining ring from the axle, clean the axle and the bearing, and re-lubricate it, or you remove the heatsink from the processor. It is glued on, so I expect heating it up to around 100°C should soften the glue enough to be able to remove the heatsink (unscrew the fan first in this scenario, too). If the old heatsink is removed, you can install any kind of socket 5/7 cooler on that processor/mainboard.

Certainly with graphics cards I find that freezing the card helps with epoxied on heatsinks better than heat does. You'd even hope/expect this to be the case as otherwise the heatsink would become less effectively attached to the CPU as the temperature rose!

Think I'll probably not remove the HSF as I'm rather afraid of damaging the CPU. Will probably go the route where mkarcher suggested to remove the retaining ring and clean the exle bearing. But the ring looks difficult to get off. Will there be any household tools and/or methods that could remove it effectively?

kalohimal wrote on 2020-08-08, 15:50:

Think I'll probably not remove the HSF as I'm rather afraid of damaging the CPU. Will probably go the route where mkarcher suggested to remove the retaining ring and clean the exle bearing. But the ring looks difficult to get off. Will there be any household tools and/or methods that could remove it effectively?

I usually try to lever it off with a small screwdriver. This might bend the ring too much (so that you can't easily reattach it or it breaks) or you might cause scratch marks when you slip, so don't use this technique on equipment you try to keep in mint condition. On that cooler, I personally wouldn't mind the risk.