Well, my negotiations for exchanging this mobo for one with a passive cooler is not going well.

So either I find and buy the actual heatsink from the manufacturer that makes it (doubtful that Lippert makes this on their own). Or I find a DIY solution.

Here is Lippert's passive heatsink. It's a biggun.



Here's what the one I have looks like.



Oh, and here's an extra bonus from the engineers at Lippert.


Could they have put the headers in a poorer location? I had to bend the pins diagonally to be able to put a PCI card there. Clearly Lippert didn't think that anyone would actually use the PCI slot. :rolleyes:

And oh yeah, did I mention that there are ZERO thermal monitoring diodes on the board?

On the plus side, the board does run pretty cool overall, which makes the tiny little HSF whizzing away so annoying. Also the board is not populated with nary an electrolytic capacitor. I just noticed that my old Shuttle FV25 has a busted cap that leaked, but for some reason, is still working.
I think it's a redundant cap in the power stage for the motherboard.

Any suggestions on how to cool the Lippert Thunderbird passively? I would prefer a drop in solution, but a hacksawed, dremeled, and bolted on heatsink may have to suffice.

-Ed

I guess you are SPCR's Pentium M motherboard guinea pig...

I'm curious to know what type of mechanism is used to attach the heat-sink?

BTW what speed Pentium M chip are you using? Would you consider running some bench-marks, to help SPCR readers gain a sense of this machine's performance?



In Lippert's defense, it is an industrial (not desktop consumer) board. There may be no real need for thermal monitoring, in it's intended applications.

Is it mini-itx? The mini-itx form factor is designed for use with a PCI riser card. With a riser card, PCI cards are installed parallel to the motherboard.