Removing the heat sink of a IBM Power4 CPU:



Everyone knows the pretty cool white thick IBM chips and CPUs with the silver heat spreader on it and
the awful pins of solder. These chips are really nice, but they will be nicer without the heat spreader to see
the die core under it, and no solder pins on the bottom.
After killing some of these chips I found a way to remove it without damaging the processor.


You only need a small electric driller and a carpet cutter. With the driller you drill a small hole into the
heat spreader. You don't have to be afraid to destroy the white ceramic under it, because ceramic is harder
than the steel of the drill. You only should make the hole in a corner and not on the middle of the chip where you
will destroy the die core.
Then you can shore up the heat spreader with a self-cutting tapping screw. It works great and I have done this
with many chips and I never damaged one.

 

After cleaning and polishing
a perfect extremely
beautiful CPU!
How to polish? Have a look
at my other articles.



For removing the solder pins I use a carpet cutter. It's really easy to cut these soft pins off the CPU. After
that you can grind the bottom with some sand paper. After that you should polish it with the special polish
from my article " cleaning chips & CPUs". The result is really beautiful.

   
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