Water Cooling Backplate doesn’t fit back into place after unscrewing

[13catak-anilja]

Hi Tom’s Hardware,
I’ve recently been having CPU temperature issues; arising to over 90 degrees on idle without load before the motherboard failsafe kicks in instantly shutting down the computer, usually within less than a minute.

This isn’t an issue with airflow as my system is well cleaned and there isn’t much dust from fans to components. I have came to the conclusion that immunity issue is either thermal paste being worn out and in need of reapplying or that my water cooling system has failed.

Hence, I decided to unscrew the backplate of the water cooling and check the situation; however the primary issue is that I can’t seem to screw back the backplate into the motherboard into the ‘4’ holes that I unscrewed the screws from within the motherboard - It might be because I removed the ‘whole’ backplate with the metal frame and the water cooler attached.

Could anyone suggest how I could reattach the frame back into place?

System specs:
CASE: NZXT Phantom 410 Mid Tower Gaming Case w/ front USB 3.0 [+5] (Black colour)
CASUPGRADE: NONE
CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+/-R/+/-RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE. (BLACK Colour)
CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.50 GHz Eight-Core AM3+ CPU 8MB L2 Cache & Turbo Core Technology *** Extreme OC ***
CS_FAN: Default Case Fan
FAN: Cooler Master Seidon 120M (AMD) Quiet Liquid Cooling system w/ 120mm Radiator (Cooler Master CPU Water Cooling *** Extreme OC ***)
HDD: 2TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64M Cache 7200rpm Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)
MEMORY: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3/1866mhz Dual Channel Memory (HyperX Fury White w/Heat Spreader
MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P AMD 970 Chipset, ATX mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, 7.1 Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III, RAID, 1 Gen PCIe x16, 1 Gen PCIe x4, 3 PCIe x1, & 2 PCI
NETWORK: ONBOARD 10/1000 NETWORK CARD
OS: Windows 10
OVERCLOCK: No Overclocking
POWERSUPPLY: 600 Watts Power Supplies (Cooler Master 600 Watts B600 B2 Gaming Power Supply, 80+)
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
VIDEO: AMD Radeon R9 280X 3GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+57] (Single Card)

 

[CountMike]

Is there a hole behind MB in the back in the case ? On those MBs and those coolers, cooler backplate is not glued to MB and when you unscrew it it will not stay in place. If no hole you may need to remove MB from case to reattach the backplate and cooler.

 

[faalin]

If you have another computer i would pull the cooler unit out and just plug it into the other computer to see if the pump is working.

From the sounds of it the pump has stopped working and that's why your getting such high temps on idle.

If your motherboard try does not have a hole behind the cpu socket then your only option would be to pull the motherboard out to be able to remount the cooler. Make sure to clean the cooler and cpu before putting on new thermal paste.