Hello TR!
I rarely post but spend a lot of time reading throughout the site and forums. Always love the opinion and insight everyone has here. I have an interesting question due to a little failure I ran into last night on my ASRock A75M Socket FM1 motherboard.
Reading online in numerous places it was said that AM3 heatsinks will fit on FM1 boards. I had a Phenom II AM3 heatsink from another build laying around and figured I might as well use it on my FM1 board as it has copper heat pipes and is quite a bit larger than the stock FM1 sink. So I went through the process of swapping them out and after about 10 seconds of the AM3 heatsink being mounted on the FM1 board it snapped the bracket plastic on both sides. Whoops.
Now I'm really wondering if the tension specs are the same between the two platforms even if they share the same size. Though that's a bit of an afterthought now.
What I am trying to figure out now without having to rip into my other systems is if FM1 and AM2/AM3 heatsink bracket screws share the same dimensions. I'd like to go pick up something like a Hyper 212 today from Frys and just mount it without the heatsink bracket but I have seen conflicting compatibility information about heatsinks that have their own mount system that replaces the plastic brackets.
1) Has anyone mounted something like the Hyper 212 to their FM1 boards?
2) Does anyone have a link to some decent schematics regarding the different screw patterns on AMD platforms?
_m