Put Arctic Silver on T60 GMA950?

[Muse]

I have the T5500 Core 2 Duo machine open and parts removed and I'm about to put Arctic Silver (3 is all I have, but it's close to 5) on the CPU. There's a thermal pad on the GPU, is I believe what I'm seeing. The GPU exposed surface is a square about 1/2" on a side and the thermal pad is a square about 1" on a side. The pad is very thin, a gummy grayish-black substance looking to be about 1/64" thick. Should I scrape that off and use Arctic Silver on it?

[ThinkRob]

Should I scrape that off and use Arctic Silver on it?

I wouldn't.

Integrated GPUs don't tend to generate much heat, and the stock cooling setup is fine.

Now the CPU... now that might benefit from Arctic Silver.

[wild_bill]

sand a dime (10 cents) to perfect flatness and replace the thermal pad with the dime (~92% copper) and put arctic silver on both sides of dime

copper conducts heat much better than low-bid Chinese thermal pad

[Muse]

sand a dime (10 cents) to perfect flatness and replace the thermal pad with the dime (~92% copper) and put arctic silver on both sides of dime

copper conducts heat much better than low-bid Chinese thermal pad

I may have to do this later. The systems all together now, in fact I'm typing on it now. First time I'd had it apart and it was no picnic. The Lenovo Service videos aren't great. One, the removal of the CPU fan had different stuff than my T60! They said remove 3 screws being on a metal bracket at the top next to the display and mine only had two. Screw placement on the bottom of mine was a little different. Other stuff wasn't the same, so I had to kind of guess on some stuff and putting it back together wasn't easy (the bezel and palmrest, even the keyboard gave me problems. However, I believe I got it back together correctly in the end.

Right now I have TPFC on "Smart" and the fan is off, the CPU 64C, and the fan comes on occasionally (every 2 minutes or so for 30 seconds and then turns off again). It's kind of nasty.

[wild_bill]

we will turn you into a certified thinkpad service technician in no time!

the trick is to take your time, and get to the root of the heat issues, and think logically and get everything back together correctly.

there is a hardware service manual here - it will help a lot!

every time you crack that sucker open you will get better at it! - soon you will be advertising thinkpad service calls for people on craigslist!

(look, a drunken 50 year old with readin glasses can do this - I am livin' proof - just takes patience and self confidence and perseverance! - lol) - also helps that I have no kids running around, just a cool cat

64C doesn't cut it, should be at 35-39C at idle - no fan allowed unless playing chess

[Muse]

I wouldn't.

Integrated GPUs don't tend to generate much heat, and the stock cooling setup is fine.

Now the CPU... now that might benefit from Arctic Silver.

I saw your response too late. I went ahead and scraped off the thermal pad, meticulously and thoroughly cleaned the GPU and applied Arctic Silver 3. I was quite worried that the heat-pipe/heat-sink wasn't making adequate if any contact with the Arctic Silver coated GPU, but couldn't think of anything to do about it, and I put the machine back together and hoped for the best. I don't know where in TPFC to get the GPU temperature, so who knows...

[wild_bill]

you can't just get rid of the thermal pad and then forget about that GAP, silly!

hope for the best? WTF?

you better get a dime or some kind of copper shim in there, these laptops don't stay cool with just hope and prayer!

[frankiepankie]

He was talking about the GPU cooling plate i suppose?

With an GMA950 the heat isn't as much an issue as with an ATi or Nvidia GPU.

But i also think 64c is too high.

[Muse]

He was talking about the GPU cooling plate i suppose?

With an GMA950 the heat isn't as much an issue as with an ATi or Nvidia GPU.

But i also think 64c is too high.

64C is the CPU (actually it got as high as 71C today, unstressed, basically idling!). How can I tell what the temp is for the GPU. Please advise!

[wild_bill]

my CPU temp is 35C today, unstressed (and I am running a Core 2 Duo T7400)

you have to get full solid copper shim where those thermal pads were to fill in the gap

71C is approaching a temp that is dangerous for the CPU itself

[dr_st]

There is no GPU per se in an GMA950 machine. The second chip you see is the northbridge (which holds the integrated graphics as well as other modules).

There is no GPU thermal sensor in GMA950 machines, so you won't see its temperature (again, there is no GPU per se).

Unfortunately, it looks like Muse's modding did not go as well as planned, 70C at idle indicates something is very wrong with the cooling of the CPU.

Wild_bill is right that there has to be something to fill the gap that was occupied by the thermal pads. It's pretty obvious really - if there is no full contact, it's like there is no cooling.

I am not sure why the CPU cooling seems to have suffered, I can assume that either the heatsink is somehow bent because of the gap, and is not making proper contact with the CPU, or maybe the thermal paste there is bad (Muse - have you applied fresh thermal paste to the CPU also or just the northbridge?)

All in all, this thread should serve as a small word of caution both to novices looking to improve their machines, and to experienced members who sometimes forget that not everyone is a skilled and experienced modder, and talk about fairly complicated things as if they are straightforward.

Muse, I hope you eventually sort this out, fix whatever is broken now, and successfully complete the modification. There is no doubt that proper modding will get your temperatures down. But it has to be done just right, otherwise you can easily make things worse (as they seem to be at the moment). Be patient and good luck.

[Tasurinchi]

There is no GPU per se in an GMA950 machine. The second chip you see is the northbridge (which holds the integrated graphics as well as other modules).

Oh dear, I was then lucky! I did a similar work some weeks ago to my both T6s, in case of the T60 I replaced the (dried) thermal paste with new Artic Silver 5, but I just left the coolingpad in the GPU out of laziness, because it looked in good shape! I was thinking about replacing it with paste too! I'm lucky I didn't and it reminds me to check the forum threads carefully next time!

But the T61's cooler did not have any cooling pad in its heatsink, so in that case I put Artic Silver 5 in both CPU&GPU! I hope that was not a mistake! I don't think so as the fan/heatsink sits firmly and after two days of use I haven't noticed any heat. But if someone can confirm it I will sleep better

Cheers!

[wild_bill]

Arctic Silver 5 is always welcome on any CPU or GPU, it is often the first thing I do on a new laptop, desktop, or video card.

Don't heap it on, less is better, you want a micro-thin coat. It is NOT for filling gaps, so if you want to get rid of an inefficient thermal pad, which is 100's or 1000's of times as thick as a rice-paper-thin coating of arctic silver 5 should be, then you have to fill that huge gap with something highly thermally conductive, namely, copper or silver or gold (gold is actually the worst of the three). - Copper is cheap and as good as the other two thermally, so this is why a lapped down U.S. 10 cent coin (aka a dime) is a convenient shim, it is ~92% copper. (For a giant gap, a U.S. 25 cent coin aka a "quarter" is also ~92% copper)

you can lap these coins down to perfect flatness with a whetstone (the type used for sharpening fine knives)

The U.S. 1 cent coin, aka the "penny", which is copper in color, is 97.5% zinc, and zinc is no good thermally, so forget the penny!

[Muse]

There was no thermal pad on the CPU, just on what is evidently the north bridge, which as well as the CPU has a plate contact for heat dispersal from the heat pipes that course out to the fan. The CPU had what looked to be copious amounts of thermal grease which oozed out beyond the contact surface. I cleaned all that up carefully using pieces of coffee filters and high purity isopropal alcohol. The thermal pad I scraped off the contact plate that went over the north bridge, and I likewise cleaned the north bridge and contact plate before applying Arctic Silver 3, as I did to the CPU, in a thin layer.

I was worried that the difference in thickness between the Arctic Silver and the thermal pad would mean there was no contact, but I couldn't detect any play. That doesn't mean there was good contact with the north bridge, possibly not. The CPU should have had decent pressure from the contact plate because it was the same arrangement as before. Maybe I'll put in lapped dimes under both contact plates, if there seems room. Or, I could do as wild_bill did and bend the heat piping a little to increase the pressure.

I think my CPU temps now are pretty similar to what they were before I did the work last night. 71C was only achieved when I turned off the fan for a few minutes. I wasn't doing anything with the machine, just browsing. At that point I turned the fan on again using TPFC.

I am not really a novice to CPU cooling. I've mounted a handful of heat sinks to CPU's in the past. It's not something I do frequently, but I'm familiar with the procedures and caveats. I've never done a laptop before, however, and it's quite a different animal. There's no heatsink assembly that you tighten down or clamp onto the CPU with obvious considerable force. I'll at least put a lapped dime over the north bridge and reapply Arctic Silver (probably get some AS 5 this time), to the CPU, give some thought to increasing the pressure of the plate above the CPU. I will also clean up the heat pipes. Whoever assembled the T60 in a Chinese factory obviously got a lot of thermal paste on the heatpipes in some places, pure sloppiness, evidently, and I didn't bother to clean that up yesterday. I think I should probably do so, maybe with acetone, which I'm sure won't harm them.

[RealBlackStuff]

That messy goop on the CPU was most certainly NOT put on in a Lenovo factory!
Check with the previous owner(s) who obviously didn't have a clue about thermal paste.
Less is more in this case!
Don't put anything other than thermal paste between CPU and cooler!
A small square of copper plate will be easier to apply than sanding down a dime or whatever.

[wild_bill]

yes, pure copper is preferable to a dime, I just recommend a dime because everyone in USA has a dime handy, and perhaps does not have any thin copper stock laying around.

and yes, nothing but Arctic Silver 5 should be between the CPU and heatsink and that should be a micro thin coat.

and double check the cleanliness and airflow between the vanes of the big copper heatsinks at the corners of the T60 case. (the ones at the the end of the heatpipe)

be very careful when doing any heatpipe bending, this is not for the faint of heart! - any way you can generate additional clamping force on the CPU without going too crazy is generally a good thing!

also inspect the surface of the heatpipe contact plate (underside) where it touches the top of the CPU, this needs to be perfectly flat and also shiny like a mirror, so that just microns of AS5 complete the thermal connection because the mating of these is so perfect - i.e. any gap, no matter how tiny, is bad for heat transfer!

PS - another sort-of unrelated thought, but still related: (assuming you are using Windows) Have you checked for a bunch of autostart crap that may be running the processor when it is supposedly idle? - I have seen computers that clandestinely autostart 25 different programs down in the tray area when you need none of them. In these cases the processor can be working hard with "nothing" open on the Windows desktop. Even a hidden virus, trojan, or rootkit can be the culprit!

[Muse]

That messy goop on the CPU was most certainly NOT put on in a Lenovo factory!
Check with the previous owner(s) who obviously didn't have a clue about thermal paste.
Less is more in this case!
Don't put anything other than thermal paste between CPU and cooler!
A small square of copper plate will be easier to apply than sanding down a dime or whatever.

No, I think the mess had to be done in the factory. I bought this T60 direct from Lenovo in November 2006 (i.e. 4 years ago). On all four sides of the heat dispersion square on top of the Core 2 Duo T5500 was mucho thermal goop squeezed out when they assembled things. Also, there is a not insubstantial amount of white dried stuff (probably the same goop) on portions of the heat piping. The former I cleaned pretty thoroughly when I cleaned the surface of the CPU but I didn't try (yet) cleaning the heat piping. However I will do so when I go in here again, and I figure to in a week or two, as I say. Right now I have TPFC set to "BIOS" so I presume the machine is acting as it did before I installed TPFC. It's on again off again, fan speed ~3000 RPM. Hey, to be honest I'm used to it. This is the way it's been acting. Does it bug me? Yeah, but it's not driving me up the wall because I'm used to it. I'd prefer silence, of course. I'll try again. I think I can probably improve things a lot, maybe achieve silence.

I looked around yesterday, and as I figured I didn't find any thin copper plate in my work room.

I began lapping a 1966 dime. I don't know if the silver content is higher than newer dimes, but I figure it isn't apt to be lower. Is the copper at least 92%? How do you lap a dime? Use your fingers? This is tedious and is going to take probably over an hour. I have some ideas on how I can do it with my grinder to get through the graphics (of course, finishing the work by hand).

[Dale H. Cook]

I just recommend a dime because everyone in USA has a dime handy, and perhaps does not have any thin copper stock laying around.

For those who might like to try thin copper stock instead, if you know anyone who works at an AM radio station ask them to put you in touch with their Chief Engineer. We use quite a bit of copper strap in ground systems (some of it silver-plated) and often have scraps lying about.

[Muse]

For those who might like to try thin copper stock instead, if you know anyone who works at an AM radio station ask them to put you in touch with their Chief Engineer. We use quite a bit of copper strap in ground systems (some of it silver-plated) and often have scraps lying about.

How about an FM station? I do my weekly radio show tomorrow and I'll ask the engineer, he's usually there when I do my show, Mondays noon-3PM, KALX, Berkeley, 90.7 FM, and streaming at http://www.kalx.berkeley.edu. Seriously, tune in if you have eclectic tastes in music. I'm very eclectic. I figure it's a rare bird who likes everything I play, but if you like music you're bound to hear a lot you do like, probably like a lot! My handle on the radio is the same as here, "Muse."

Back on topic:

I am wondering if I might do better using pennies than dimes. A google search reveals that 1982 pennies and previous are 95% copper:

http://coins.about.com/od/uscoins/f/copper_to_zinc.htm

...where it says:

"If your Lincoln Memorial penny has a date before 1982, it is made of 95% copper. If the date is 1983 or later, it is made of 97.5% zinc and plated with a thin copper coating.

For pennies minted in 1982, when both copper and zinc cents were made, the safest and best way to tell their composition is to weigh them. Copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams, whereas the zinc pennies weigh only 2.5 grams. Be sure to use a scale that is accurate enough to detect the tenth of a gram (0.10) or better. If you weigh a zinc penny on a scale that can only register full 1 gram increments, the penny will usually display 3 grams, since the scale rounds the 2.5 gram zinc penny upwards to 3. The wrong type of scale can be misleading when you are trying to sort copper and zinc pennies."

I just looked in my current "collection" of over 50 pennies and I have around 10 from before 1983. There are two 1982's (as stated above, the year they minted both the old composition and the new composition pennies), and one weighs 3.1g (i.e. copper), the other 2.4g (i.e. zinc). All these 3.1g pennies are 95% copper.

According to Wikipedia:

"With the passage of the Coinage Act of 1965, the composition of the dime changed from 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper to a clad "sandwich" of pure copper inner layer between two outer layers of cupronickel (75% Copper, 25% Nickel) alloy [1] giving a total composition of 91.67% Cu and 8.33% Ni."

So, if you lap a post-1965 dime, if you lap through the outer layer you will get to 100% copper. The outer layer is only 75% copper, however. I have a couple of 1966 dimes, but nothing previous. Pre-1966 Roosevelt dimes would be excellent because they're 90% silver and 10% copper. But 100% copper is pretty good, I figure, and a well-lapped modern dime is just that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_%28Un ... es_coin%29

[Dale H. Cook]

How about an FM station?

What materials they use in their ground systems varies. I use copper strap at transmitter sites, but have used large gauge wire or large copper braid in studios not near an RF source. I have seen FM transmitter sites, though, without proper grounding. That is virtually impossible at an AM transmitter site, where the soil near the tower is part of the antenna.

[Muse]

What materials they use in their ground systems varies. I use copper strap at transmitter sites, but have used large gauge wire or large copper braid in studios not near an RF source. I have seen FM transmitter sites, though, without proper grounding. That is virtually impossible at an AM transmitter site, where the soil near the tower is part of the antenna.

Our engineer is relatively new on the job. He may well have never been up to the transmitter. It's about 700-800 feet higher than the office/air-studio location, up in the hills. He does, however, routinely deal with all the electronics in the air, production and news studios, the network and so on. He may well have a piece of flat copper strip he can lay on me. I'll certainly ask when I see him, likely tomorrow morning. Thanks. Meantime, I have a mind to lap a dime and if not much trouble a 95% copper penny this morning if it's not too much trouble. Oh, maybe I'll wait and see if Joe has anything!

[wild_bill]

The old coins sound like a good idea, but I hope the old dime is not too valuable to use up for this!

also, if you use a penny, don't use that borderline year of 1982 if there is some chance it may not be 95%, just go back another year or two!

I used to be the assistant chief engineer at Honolulu's largest AM station, KSSK, we use to fly up to the transmitter to work in the same helicopter you see on episodes of Magnum, PI - This was in the early eighties when their morning host Aku was the highest paid on air radio personality in the world.

[Muse]

I don't think any of my dimes are worth more than 10 cents! The oldest I have is 1966, the year they started the new composition.

I have good digital scales, and I believe that any penny weighing 3.1g is 95% copper. It's the 2.5g ones that are mostly zinc. Anyway, no reason to use a 1982 penny, I have around 10 that are older (back to 1949) and a cinch to be 95% copper. I'll tackle this T60 again soon, but tomorrow the replacement for my dead Acer is coming, and I'll be busy with it for a while, a T61 with T7700 2.4GHz, WSXGA+ 15.4" and Intel graphics. They said it was professionally refurbished. Hopefully it'll be OK. Don't know when I'll do it, but I intend to replace its 100GB HD with a new 640GB Samsung, the two 2GB G.Skill DDR2 DIMMs from my dead Acer, and then Windows 7 64bit Ultimate. I've had that install disk for a while, unused. This won't be a "laptop," but a desktop replacement downstairs.

Must have been exciting at KSSK with Aku there. HI is a trip. I lived on Maui 1970-73. Magic place. The locals taught me how to skin dive for a living!