Arctic Silver instruction/info thread?

[emorphien]

I know all about arctic silver, but what I don't know about is the construction of the cooling system in my T43p.

I know on some laptops that the cooler is separated from the chips by a thermal pad that leaves a gap far too thick to be filled by simply thermal compound alone.

What is the situation with the T43p video card? Does anyone have experience? I'd rather not pry off the heat sink running blind without an idea of what I'll see under there.


Unfortunately I spent some time searching and couldn't find much useful information as usual.

[ehsu]

Do a search and type in "arctic silver" under the T series forum, you will find lots of information about arctic silver application and the T4x inside structure.

Check this thread for pics as well.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=14374

[emorphien]

I'm specifically looking for the size of gap between the GPU and cooling system.

It looks to be laying flat on there but I was hoping to have that confirmed since most the threads I've found involved the CPU only.

[ehsu]

On my T42, like this thread, http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... tic+silver

There is a pink padding between the GPU and the copper cooler with a heatpipe to the dissipating fins. There are 4 screws on the cooler. Three of them forms a triangular shape zone secures around the CPU sucket. One of them is to the right of the GPU cooler that secure the cooler firmly on the GPU with the shared CPU screw which is to the left of the GPU cooler. There shouldn't be any gap at all between the cooler and the GPU. Unless you are talking about the tiny holes on the pink padding, then yes, I believe there is some tiny holes that create gap between the pink padding and the GPU.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v346/ ... NY1442.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v346/ ... NY1424.jpg

[emorphien]

The concern I would have is if the gap after removing the pink padding would be too large for AS5 to fill. Generally with padding like that it is too large of a gap.

From one thread it looks like it works, but I'm not enthused by his assumptions.

[ehsu]

Oh, ok. I didn't bother to remove the pink padding as I didn't want to avoid the warranty.

Yeah, the gap may be too large for AS5 to fill in if you want to remove the padding completely off the cooler. The padding is a kinda thick, like 2mm or something. I guess if you can secure the screws really tight on the both sides of the GPU, then there might be a chance to make a good contact.