I feel so bad right now. I have a 1.4ghz old laptop and bought a 1.8ghz cpu for upgrade (yeah i know...). So i opened the laptop up last night and then i realize the cpu is actually solder onto the motherboard well, so i was like, since i spent an hour opening it, maybe i should replace thermal grease just for the heck of it. So i clean everything with alcohol and applied some new AS5. When i try to put everything together, i realized one more thing. There is a gap between heat sink and the cpu. It was bridged by thermal grease before. After some googling, i realized a lot of laptops have a gap like that. My question is why is that gap even there? I am using AS5 to bridge the gap right now and its probably the worse thing to do.
I don't even own (not yet) or opened a laptop before... (desktop computer, yes, countless times) But if you have space between the CPU (with thermal grease on top) and the heatsink, try putting a perfectly or near perfectly smooth coper plate of the thickness of the space gap that you have. Of course you have to to add thermal grease on the other side of the coper plate. So you have have ----- Heatsink ----- thermal grease ----- smooth polish coper plate ----- thermal grease ----- CPU Also note that you must always apply a thin (thickness or ordinary paper) layer of thermal grease and equally distributed for best results.
thats what i thought of doing at first. but the gap is there probably for a reason. I don't want to add something that would cause harm.
could it have something to do with the laptop having to withstand being thrown around? Thermal grease flexes, but CPU core/heatsink not that much. That's the first thing to pop into my mind atleast.
There's probably a gap because it was left for the thermal pad thingy, they have a thickness of a couple of millimetres quite often, and, as above, it'll withstand flexing a bit more readily.
It is, the best paste in the world is no good in a thick layer. As you've probably found, Either find a suitably thick pad, or a thin copper shim for the GoodBytes way.
