Thermal paste for a notebook

J. Sparrow · Post by **J. Sparrow** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:02 pm

I'm currently servicing my sister's laptop. The thing has a copper cooler with a heatpipe and spring-loaded screws for the mounting.

It also has a weird kind of pad as a thermal interface for the CPU. Any experience with these? Is it safe to remove it and replace it with a more mundane thermal paste?

Here's a couple shots of the thing:

DanaG · Post by **DanaG** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 4:06 pm

Well, how thick is the thermal pad? If it's not negligible, I'd suggest finding a good thermal pad to replace it; otherwise, you'll have to do what I did with my notebook: many alternating layers of thermal paste and thick aluminum foil.
In my case, Gateway had left a visible gap between the northbridge and the heatpipe contact point.

Edit: An example of thermal pads:
http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l3/g8/c127 ... Page1.html
Edit again: It looks like some of those may be adhesive, and not just conductive.

J. Sparrow · Post by **J. Sparrow** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 6:35 am

I've been forced to find a quick solution, as the laptop was shutting itself down when running memtest for more than 10 minutes.

I applied a thin layer of Arctic Cooling MX-1 (just because it's advertised to last several years); and when I say thin I mean REALLY THIN, as the paste has become hard to apply (it came from the box of a cooler which I installed some weeks ago

)

The spring-loaded screws seem to do a fine job in keeping the copper base tightly attached to the IHS, luckily no aluminum was necessary

Now the machine works fine. It's really hot, though... but that's Intel's own fault

Thank you for your answer