M10 fan to a T40

[micl9]

Hey All,
I have been searching the forum for help with this. Found lots of good stuff on getting the fans removed, and they now are, but nothing directly addressing my question.
My goal was to pull parts from a GPU issue T42 Mobo and put them into a T40.
Swapped in the new CPU and had intended to use the better M10 fan in place of the T40s stock M9 (both long fans).
Now here is my question - which I could not find using search.
The T40 has a ATI9000 GPU (no metal heat spreader ie 3 chips in direct contact with the thermal pad) and a thick gray thermal pad. The doner T42 had a 9600 GPU with metal heat spreader covering all 3 chips and the ubiquitous pink pad.
When the M10 fan is installed in the T40 there is a gap between the pink pad and the GPU chips.
So now my question - to use the M10 fan I need to fill the gap representing the 9600 heat spreader or use a new thick thermal pad. Any suggestions?

Sorry for the 1 millionth post on this topic, I really did search for almost an hour.

[Bruce Guttman]

How much of a space is there between the heat sink and the GPU? I would suspect it isn't too much.

I would try a brass shim cut to the size of the pink pad. You would put heat transfer compound on both sides of the shim and mount the fan. Thickness should be about the amount of gap to cover.

Alternatively, maybe there is a thicker pink pad you could get...

[richk]

If it were me, I wouldn't use a thick layer of paste. The metal piece over the T42 heatsink can be removed by working slowly with a razor blade. Clean off the old thermal adhesive. Then set the metal piece with a thin layer of thermal paste

[micl9]

Thanks for the feedback guys

@BruceG - Its about 1mm, pretty substantial - too big to shim.
@richk - I thought about that, but this is not my primary T4x and I may actually sell it and I didn't have any thermal paste in my tool box. So i just reused the origianl T40 fan assy as the thermal pad was in good shape.

Have been running Lenovo stress test and PRIME95 concurrently for a day now with no issues.