I recently picked up an ECS A939 motherboard
for the Athlon 64 FX which had failed for the
previous owner. The failure was caused when the
heat sink unit for the Northbridge chipset
fell off, thereby allowing the chipset to fry.

I looked at the heat sink and it was glued to
the chipset with double sided sticky tape. On
closer examination I saw that there were spring
arms that should have been attached to the MB
via two loops soldered on the MB. The problem
was that when the MB was manufactured one of
the loops wasn't installed even though there were
two holes and solder pads for the loop.

I guess that someone at ECS saw the problem and
came up with the idea of glueing the heat sink
which failed in short order.

Until recently Fry's sold a variety of ECS MBs
but they seem to have switched over to Biostar (VIA).