Intel D875PBZ northbridge heatsink

Hey fellow Geeks, I need your expertise.

I have an Intel D875PBZ mainboard, which has a humongous aluminum, passive heatsink on the northbridge. It's soldered to the board in four places. Before I realized it was soldered in place, I bought a Vantec Iceberq copper heatsink/fan, to replace it with. The model number is CCB-A1C.

My question is, should I sever the soldered points and remove the Intel heatsink, and replace it with this Vantec copper heatsink, or would it be a bad thing to cut these soldered points? I know the mainboard has some sort of thermal monitoring built-in, because if I use Intel's Active Monitor software, it gives me real-time CPU temp and fan speed, and system temp, but I'm not exactly sure where that "system temp" is being read from.

Will I wreck the mainboard by removing the heatsink, or will I only lose that particular monitoring ability? Could I then solder the copper sink to those points and regain monitoring ability? Any thoughts? Ideas?

Thanks!

 

Well, no one seems to know, and teh intarweb doesn't seem to know either.

So I'm gonna do it and see what happens...

 

OK, pending final result:

one warranty voided

one mainboard probably killed.

I took off the aluminum heatsink, used thermal tape to apply the copper sink, put everything back together, and now nothing shows up on my screen. (Yes, it's plugged in and turned on.) The hard-disk spins up, and it sounds like it's booting normally. I even get the one BIOS beep, as normal. But my CRT gives me the yellow "asleep" light, instead of the green "on" light, and nothing shows up. I have the system stripped down to the minimum hardware: video card, cpu, one stick of RAM, and the boot drive. Nothing else is plugged in. The video card is plugged into the power supply.

Any ideas?

 

OK, I had another idea. Maybe if I solder those four points together, it'll work. I could use either wire and solder it to those points where the original heatsink was attached, and connect them all together, or solder them to the new heatsink.

Any ideas or thoughts on that?

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