nah, its totally doable

with the metal side toward you, on the short edges, you will actually see little indentations where you can put a blade in to pop the clamshell open. it will take a bit of force, but the plastic is very resilient. Its not fragile.

If memory serves me, you will now be presented with 2 metal bars. you can remove them by bending the 2 metal tabs out slightly with a sharp blade or small flathead. To reinstall the clips, bend all 4 little tabs flat with the metal. then just reinsert onto the posts that stick through the pcb.

At least thats how I remember doing it. I havent had cause to open a processor in ages. Also AMD did this with their slot-A chips too.

Or use needle nose pliers, bend the end one at a time of these bars slightly to open it up and let tension spring it free from the pins. Does not take much bending. If bent just bend them back and on reinstallation, just snap them on with your fingers pressure.

Done this all the time.

Cheers,

tp1020 wrote on 2021-05-07, 22:28:

thinking it might be a good idea to replace the thermal paste.

y tho? Is this something you've heard of a lot of people doing? Have you determined that these chips are running unusually hot? Seems to me the risk of damage isn't worth the potential payoff.

Jorpho wrote on 2021-05-08, 06:17:

tp1020 wrote on 2021-05-07, 22:28:

thinking it might be a good idea to replace the thermal paste.

y tho? Is this something you've heard of a lot of people doing? Have you determined that these chips are running unusually hot? Seems to me the risk of damage isn't worth the potential payoff.

it's actually very little risk, as long as you aren't trying to use a pipe wrench or something.

its not actually a bad idea as the tim is likely 30 years old almost.

luckybob wrote on 2021-05-08, 06:25:

its not actually a bad idea as the tim is likely 30 years old almost.

But is thermal paste known to degrade? Especially in a chip that hasn't been constantly used, and that is rather tightly-sealed and insulated from the atmosphere?

I mean, this hasn't come up before, and it seems like something that should be pretty easy to establish.

Oh yeah thermal paste dries up and gets chalky and powdery and it becomes ineffective. I repaste everything CPUs and gpus. It's cheap insurance from heat related issues/death. The P2 ,P3 , and slot A cpu cartridges are very easy to open and service. If you've never opened up one they are not sealed at all to the air quite the opposite.

Had a Slot A Athlon that I eventually cracked open out of curiosity. One of the posts that the case clips on to really didn't want to let go of the case, and it didn't help that it was a fair way from any leverage points. The crack noise it made when it finally gave way had me worried, but no damage caused. Opening the case up gave access to the debug header, used for changing voltage and multipliers, but also let me check the thermal paste. The main heat spreader makes good contact with the actual CPU chip, but is about 1.5mm above the cache chips. There was supposed to be some sort of grey thermal goop filling the gap, but for one of them it had ended up only filling the gap for a tiny part of the chip; for most of the chip there was clear space visible between chip and heatspreader. I replaced the goop with some thermal pads which seems to have worked ok. So definitely worthwhile checking in my case.

If you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cdWYEARJYo
it shows how to open up a P2 cpu, just do not do it that way 😀 but it does show the cpu and cache chips with the compound and pads.