Nvidia thermal paste - gap or not gap?

[xirtyllo]

It seems that I got lucky and I found a 08/08 Nvidia T61 on ebay

I didn't receive it yet, but I'm already thinking about the best way to maximize the cooling system , especially for the GPU (from what I read they tend to be hot)

I have read many informations and experiments, on this and on other forums, but I still have a few doubts:

- some people say that there is a gap between the GPU and the heatsink (is there consensus on this?). Therefore some people bent the GPU heatpipe or used a copper shim to close that gap. Some of them reporting substantially lower temperatures.

- it seems that everybody agrees that there is a gap on the T60p models and that it causes unnecessary heat there, but about the T61 models I didn't find such broad agreement...

[Cola]

There is a cooling pad between the graphics chip and the square metal surface of the cooler, so if you remove that cooling pad, you will have the gap people are mentioning.

[xirtyllo]

just an update:

it seems to me that on this T61 there is no gap between the GPU and heatsink... in fact when I opened it it already had thermal paste on the GPU (and cooling pad on northbridge).

at the end I opted to replace the stock thermal paste with some IC Diamond thermal paste.