ThinkPad A30p adding thermal pad/sponge onto GPU

[kfzhu1229]

As the title suggested, I took out the thermal sponge lying in the bottom of the ATI chip of a broken A31p motherboard (Southbridge short-circuit) (A30 models have the thermal sponge glued onto the base while A31 models have the sponge glued to the motherboard) and tried putting it right between the GPU of my A30p and the heatsink. To my surprise, the thickness is spot-on! Then I put everything back, ran 3DMark01 and Half-life 2 for a total of 30 minutes and check the temperature once again. Sure enough now the part of the heatsink above the GPU does receive some warmth (35C) and when I took it apart once again, the thermal sponge also did receive identical temperature with the GPU.
Now the question is, is this solution even good to start with? Also while the heat transfering works, will the VRAM chips fry instead because of altered ventilation routes?

[kfzhu1229]

Okay just happened to watch a 720p movie on my A30p (the codec of that movie is down below in case you wonder what 720p formats work with A30p)

Code: Select all

Video: Xvid 1280x536 23.976fps 3798kbps [V: mpeg4 simple profile, yuv420p, 1280x536, 3798 kb/s]

After the two hours, sure enough the GPU heated up to the temperature of the heatsink while the CPU temp peaks at 70C (since A3x carry no thermal data on their GPU chips, I cannot give accurate data); the part of the base where the labels are and the two memory chips beside the GPU (one memory chip is right under the keyboard so I can touch by my fingers) are just hot enough to be too hot for the touch. Then after 10 minutes when the CPU settles down to <45C (I set the fan to start at 45C and stop at 39C just like the setup for T4x models), the heat in the base is only warm (~36C) and so is the GPU! So I think at least the extra thermal sponge has *some* effects to the GPU temperature.
Also one thing to confirm: Does the Radeon 7000 in A30/A30p have a fixed clock or something? Does that mean whether the GPU is occupied or not, it produces almost the same amount of heat?