eMachines Laptop: Thermal Stupid

[sparta.rising]

So, 5 years ago my parents bought an eMachines laptop without consulting me. As you can guess, it wasn't a particularly good machine. It has a 2GHz Celeron processor which had one temperature (HOT) and its fan had one speed (TURBINE). I finally got it away from them by replacing with with an R51. I decided to open up this bad mother trucker up and see if I could apply some AS5 to maybe keep it a little cooler. Here's what I found:

http://i34.tinypic.com/amv0go.jpg

Basically, there was a silver piece of foil between the processor and heatsink. Now, I know older processors just had thermal-conductive pads, but this just looks like aluminum foil. I'm going to replace it with AS5 anyway, so I peel back the pad and find this:

http://i38.tinypic.com/255ma7q.jpg

Thermal grease... under the piece of aluminum foil. Now what is the point of thermal grease if its covered by a pad that won't make perfect contact with the processor? GEEZ! I've heard of similar things on the xbox360 gpu, so, it might not be a mistake, but it just seems stupid.

[joester]

I would be curious to know if there are appropriate markings under the foil and grease for the chip. I suppose it's possible that the assemblers purchased pre-greased chips, but the assembly instructions hadn't been geared for them, or someone left out the "remove protective foil" step.

Joe

[agarza]

What's the result of applying AS5, did the heatsink made good contact with the GPU after the extraction of the aluminum foil?

[sparta.rising]

To be honest I haven't used the machine much since applying the paste. It made good contact... I wasn't removing a thick pad or anything, just a thin layer of foil and a thin layer of paste. There was already a copper spacer attached to the heatsink. In addition the heatsink was held down with springed screws (don't know the technical term) so I was able to tighten it securely.

If I remember correctly NHC was mostly useless on the machine... lacked individual heat sensors. Any observations I made about heat and sound have no quantitative backing so aren't really worth mentioning.