What thermal pad can I use?

[Joel Chase]

I am replacing my motherboard on my wide screen T61 and both thermal pads for the northbride and the nvidia GPU had to be scraped off. I still have some ~5mm thick thermal pads I used on for an xbox repair. Can I get away with using them or should I purchase 2mm thick pads instead? Here are what the pads look like:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Xbox-360-Repair ... 0366153398

Please suggest any other alternatives. I hate to wait another day without the laptop, the wife is threatening to buy an MacBook. Help me stay in PCDom.

[kenzking]

I was just looking this up yesterday for my T60. From what I found it seems that the space between the GPU die and heat sink is around .5mm. Some people have had success by slightly bending the heatpipe and putting the heat sink in direct contact with the gpu (using grease & no pad), or using a shim. Keep in mind this was for the T60's. I am not sure if the T61 is the same, it could be different but I would think they are similar as the Heatsink/Fan assembly are related.

I assume a .5mm thermal pad would be fine, if you have an extra pad, install it and then remove it. Check to see it gets a solid imprint of the GPU die on the pad after removing it. Should be fine if you do.

[Medessec]

I believe for the T61's GPU, a thermal pad will be insufficient, and you'll need thermal grease. For the northbridge, you should probably use a normal thermal conductive pad. Just go to ebay and type in Thermal Conductive pad. But the XBOX kit thermal pads might work. Although if you're on ebay you might as well buy the thermal pads.

If your wife is threatening to spend all that money on a MacBook, that should be more than enough money for a brand new Haswell Thinkpad...!