Don't mind me, I'm just mesmerised by this implausibly pleasing trick for fixing bent cooling rad fins

I use toothpicks, but great little trick if you have bent radiator fins from r/pcmasterrace


I just stumbled upon this short video on reddit and had to share. For one thing, it's a super useful little trick for fixing the bent fins on a cooling radiator, or even on a big tower cooler. For another, it's utterly mesmerising to watch.

The radiators of CPU liquid chip chillers are easy to screw up. All it takes is an errant screwdriver waved in its general direction, or y'know a clumsy-ass system builder who can't help but drop things. 

The myriad tiny fins concertinaed into the radiator are what gives a liquid cooler the surface area necessary to chill down the fluid flooding it, and these are the delicate bits that get all kinds of bent out of shape.

But this little trick highlights that all you need is a pair of Phillips head screwdrivers to satisfyingly put things right.

It's even more satisfying that sticking a credit card through the bent pins of an old pin grid array AMD processor of the previous generations. Getting those tiny pins back into line was always an odd pleasure. And something I had to do a lot when the red team's old PR company used to send out review chips in jiffy bags. 

Loose. In jiffy bags.

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Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.