Well most 486 don't need much cooling to begin with so you won't need a costly cooler, just some basic chipset coolers from China for a few bucks and some thermal adhesive pads then you are set. I wouldn't go the extra mile until dealing with Cyrix 5x86 because of their cost these days.

You could consider using wire or zip ties to secure a light weight cooler to the socket and getting by with that.

I have a spool of garden wire I can try. I have a z-clip, though I don't see how to attach it. I am trying connect a larger heatsink and fan with variable speed control for a project.

If the motherboard is going to be sitting flat all of the time, you could literally just let the cooler sit on top of the CPU without retention clips or adhesive. Anything that ran in Socket 3 didn't need cooling or much of it to begin with, like nforce4max said.

You can use a large paperclip or a piece of steel wire to make someting like this:

- and use any socket 7 / small socket 370 heatsink / fan. Even some mainboard / video card heatsinks will fit.

The trick is to bend the wire / clip so that the ends come under the off center tabs, but to also bend it in the middle, where it goes on top of the heatsink so it can put pressure on the heatsink.

Not sure how heavy heatsinks could be used with that, but I designed and 3d printed clips for mounting the heatsink directly to the CPU (black ones). These must be printed with ABS, not PLA.
But earlier I made a prototype (white clips), just by cutting it from HIPS polystyrene sheet. Maybe you would be able to cut such clip from an old piece of plastic, like DVD case. Such clips were a standard for mounting lightweight radiators to old CPUs.

I also tried bending a paperclip, but it needs to be done in a precise way 😁

I have the z-clip pictured above, though I wasn't sure how it connected to the fat tabs on my socket.

I would try the plastic clip idea, but I need to put a 60mm with an 80mm adapter on it.

The project is less about cooling, and more about having functional knobs to regulate fan speed. It is sort of like an art project.

adalbert wrote:

I also tried bending a paperclip, but it needs to be done in a precise way 😁

I used the paperclip method a lot before I got lucky and found some socket 3 coolers complete with plastic clips. I had no issues bending the paperclips / steel wire - you just need a set of pliers.