Use 2 long nose pliers, one to press the clip downward, the other to push the clip out from the latch. Be careful not to damage the motherboard. You can place a piece of electrical tape beneath to protect the board, in case of any accidental slippage.

Well it was my idea too - however amount of force required to unlatch this clip makes me uneasy. This is terrible cooler design.

kalohimal wrote on 2020-07-07, 15:47:

Use 2 long nose pliers, one to press the clip downward, the other to push the clip out from the latch. Be careful not to damage the motherboard. You can place a piece of electrical tape beneath to protect the board, in case of any accidental slippage.

Just adding that it is usually better to push the clip from the memory sockets side, since usually there are no other components very near that can be broken accidentally. Take out the memory modules before, of course.

VerT wrote on 2020-07-07, 15:58:

Well it was my idea too - however amount of force required to unlatch this clip makes me uneasy. This is terrible cooler design.

Yes, it is a bad design, but with some practice it can be done in almost no time and with no damage to anything.

there should be a small extra slot on one side of the clip, you can slot in a flat head screw driver there and then comfortably push the clip down and slightly bend it outwards (just pushing it down won't release the clip) without fear of hitting the motherboard, just make sure the screwdriver is firmly seated in there, once the one side has been removed it should just slide off easily.

I've got it!

I still cannot belive that someone thought it was good idea to make direckt-die coolers with this design. As you can see - die has inprinted itself in cooler base and CPU has chipped corner (probably work of the prewious owner). I hope it still works, will be testing that in week or so. Thaks you all!

was there no thermal pad/paste on it at all?

That's why they added heat spreader to later CPUs like Tualatin.

For the future, go for the long side of the clip (the upper part on your 2nd photo), that's the end that it's supposed to be pushed down. It can turn ugly if you try it on the wrong end.

VerT wrote on 2020-07-07, 15:58:

Well it was my idea too - however amount of force required to unlatch this clip makes me uneasy. This is terrible cooler design.

For some reason, some of the stock Intel s370 HSFs had these metal clips which were much harder to remove. I ended up starting to push the clip down on one side harder and harder while trying to wedge a flatbed screwdriver between the clip and the plastic socket latch until I had just the right amount of force to use the flatbed screwdriver to push the metal clip from the plastic socket latch.

I'd advice to replace this metal clip with a compatible clip from some other HSF and never use the crappy clip again. It is indeed a terrible design.

I did go for the longer side of clip - even if I would want to go for shorter one it was blocked by mobo components... Thermal paste crumbled into dust. As I've said - I'll test if everything still works and look into possible solutions (buying SL5QJ with IHS is probably safest bet as I cannot find better mounting clips in my country).

Terrible design indeed. Often aftermarket clips have an actual socket for a screwdriver, or a lever you can just grab with your fingers. However, I hate the Intel four-pushpin design even more.

just to clarify, does your clip have the extra "screw driver hole" I posted a picture of or not?

Bad design is one thing but it's downright evil. Instead of using metal hooks they used plastic that is under constant strain from the cooler's spring clip.
I've seen a lot of these plastic hooks broken off. Luckily there are 2 sets of these hooks on a single socket but the other one is designed for a different cooler.

Quick update - it's still working!

Very nice. Some of those coolers are real nail bitters to remove. But the sk 370 CPUs are quite resilient.

I remember that a friend of mine crushed an Athlon 1200 when it was brand new, it had a chipped corner and was dead. Many coolers of that era are really annoying.

And AMD CPUs were a tad easier to break than Intel CPUs back then.

I think all of my socket A cpus had chipped corners back when, but they all worked anyways ^^