AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 1: Intro to Opteron/K8 Architecture

An excellent heatsink mounting mechanism

Mounting heatsinks has become a dreaded task in recent times, mainly because of poorly designed solutions that could pose danger to either your CPU or your motherboard, or even both.

Even Intel has fallen behind as the latest Pentium 4 coolers have a tendency to bend the motherboard's PCB because of the mounting mechanism and the incredible amount of force required to keep the heatsink mounted properly.

AMD's solution for Opteron is quite elegant and requires no more than two screws:

Thanks to the integrated heatspreader on the Opteron, we no longer have to worry about cracked cores: