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Processor Heat Sink Repair/fine tuning
Hello,
This may be useful or informative to those of you who install Heat Sinks and Fans on your processor on the motherboard. Recently I built a new AMD-based computer. When putting on the new heatsink, I decided to take a few hours trying different heat sinks & fan combinations, to see what difference in temperature was reported. I took off a 'Cooler One' HSF from my old XP 1700+, and looked at the copper where it contacted the processor. Nicely polished, but kind of uneven - not flat. Hadn't looked this close when I installed it. After hand-machining with a good flat file, I had removed the waves from the surface. Installing it, I achieved a temperature reduction of 5 deg. C. Looking at the bottom of a couple of other aluminum HS, I found they were not very flat, either. In this case they were all concave, i.e., the center was deeper/closer to the fan than the edges. I corrected this on one other HS as well. Cooler by 3 deg. C. I was pleased by these results, but disappointed by the quality of the heat sinks I had. I believe the thermal pad is designed to compensate for the uneven contact on the processor. This way, the HS can be made faster/cheaper. In my experience in utilizing a file for this purpose, I must practice a process of slowly and carefully removing the material. This means filing across the HS from different directions, with a fine(not coarse) flat file that is in very good condition. And often rotating the file to the other side, and cleaning the file frequently with a file card or wire brush. Material embedded in the file will scratch the surface that is being filed. The cutting action occurs when it is pushing away, due to the design. Pulling back can have a polishing action, but that's during the final cleanup. Other techniques exist... your experience may vary. I am not recommending anyone do this work as I have described above. Only reporting my experience - FYI. This is my hold-harmless statement. If you do choose to do this, please post with your results. Good luck to all. Best Regards, Craig |
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On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, wrote:
[snip] I took off a 'Cooler One' HSF from my old XP 1700+, and looked at the copper where it contacted the processor. Nicely polished, but kind of uneven - not flat. Hadn't looked this close when I installed it. After hand-machining with a good flat file, I had removed the waves from the surface. Installing it, I achieved a temperature reduction of 5 deg. C. Looking at the bottom of a couple of other aluminum HS, I found they were not very flat, either. In this case they were all concave, i.e., the center was deeper/closer to the fan than the edges. I corrected this on one other HS as well. Cooler by 3 deg. C. I was pleased by these results, but disappointed by the quality of the heat sinks I had. [snip] I am not recommending anyone do this work as I have described above. Only reporting my experience - FYI. This is my hold-harmless statement. If you do choose to do this, please post with your results. Good luck to all. Here are some web pages about flattening (also called lapping) heatsinks:- http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...uides/lapping/ http://www.sysopt.com/articles/lap/index3.html http://www.fury-tech.com/modules.php...s&jump=lapping As you say, working on the heatseak risks making it worse. The really scary thing is flattening the CPU... http://users.froggy.com.au/frogge/pe...apreport1.html http://www.overclockers.com/tips31/ |
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