Heat Sink Disconnected

Is the ceramic part of the separate heatsink or an integral part of the processor?

Can you post a picture to give us a bit more information?

You may be refering to the thermal paste placed between the CPU and the heat sink. Apparently you are not familiar with what it is. If this is the case, you would do well in bringing it to a repair facility or have someone who is familiar with removing the old paste and applying the new. You can damage the computer by not taking proper grounding measures or other necessary precautions. It is replaceable. If you are not experiencing shutdowns or CPU overheating than the connection is probably enough to cool the chip. It is recommended to have it replaced to avoid possible or further damage.

Pictures would really help.

Is the heatsink just not attached or do you have a wire that broke loose? You might be able to run with this for a while with no damage to your processor, but I would definitely get this repaired as soon as possible. When you go to get it repaired it might not hurt to get a fan installed blowing on your heatsink just for safety sake.

I WOULD HAVE THE HEAT SINK FIXED. But if you are paying someone else, and your mount is damaged why not get an upgraded heatsink, it might be cheaper ,come with its own mounting hardware, and give you better performance/boost. Most come in kit form and you can do-it yourself. Check out -newegg- or some other computer parts online .

Oki,

I realize that the ambiguities in your question's description stem from unfamiliarity but bear with me as I iterate my guesses as to what you need for a repair.

1. One of the mechanical anchor points of the CPU's socket is broken so that the heatsink can no longer be securely attached onto the CPU. This can be the most frustrating scenario for you to fix. You will have to be mechanically creative with the mechanical space you have. Find some way to use existing mounting points and fabricate a custom bracket to hold the heatsink on the CPU. (As the CPU generates heat the contact area between heatsink and CPU will change. The thermal compound's job is to ooze into the voids that occur and maintain good thermal conductivity as deformations happen. This non local mounting support approach will increase this effect, use plenty of compound.) DO NOT drill any holes into the motherboard to create convenient mounting locations. You might even consider assembling a plenum from the CPU fan mounted to the heatsink to both hold the heatsink and fan assembly in place and direct the airflow to exhaust out of the chassis. The easiest solution to mounting the heatsink, but this should only be used as a last resort, will be to locate some thermal compound epoxy and glue the heatsink to the CPU.
2. The mounting hardware on the heatsink has broken. Easy, replace heatsink with one of the myriad of after market products.

As far as the question about damaging your CPU though, most CPUs today when they overheat slow themselves down to reduce the amount of heat produced per second. So the heatsink really just permits your processor to run at top speed for a longer period of time. So this brings up the question of what you are doing with your computer? If you are doing low processor load work like word processing, e-mail, simple spreadsheets then you may not wish to do anything. But if you bought the machine as a gaming machine and opened the cover to find out why this supposed screamer is no faster than your older machine, well you found out why.

Thanks to all respondants. I will put your advise to use and try to fix it myself. I have also found an interesting experiment with temperature measurements with different quantities of thermal paste. This is the link, http://www.hardcore-modding.com/modules.php?name=Guia&op=leer&artid=41