Thermal Pad - Help!

I have an Acer Aspire 7520 Laptop. A few months ago, I had some heat issues, so I opened it up, cleaned the vents, fan and removed the stock paste from the CPU and replaced with AS-5.

The assembly is a copper bar that is fixed to the Northbridge (GPU) chipset AND (in serial) the CPU heatsink.

When I removed this, I found a blue heatpad between the heatsink and the GPU. Nothing I'd seen before - so I tried to replace with AS-5.


Unfortunately, the pad is there for a reason, because the copper pipe is shared, and the GPU is ~1mm more shallow than the CPU, there is a gap - hence filling it with a pad.

I tried to fill it with AS-5 at the time, but I couldn't get a contact, and temps were through the roof.

So I put the heatpad back in. After having handled it, which I guess isn't the best of ideas.



Everything had been great since - the CPU and system temps are about 5C down on what they were before the AS-5, so I'm happy.


I've just ordered a new CPU, as the system will take upto a AMD TL-66, and I only have a TK-57. So a big jump.
Again, I'll use the AS-5 on the CPU, but it gives me a chance to replace the "dirty and probably poor" Acer-supplied Thermal Pad.


So, long story short, I've had a TON of trouble finding thermal pads - google isn't helping.

Does anyone recommend a product for me?



ALTERNATIVELY
I've heard I can replace the thermal pad with a copper shim. Anyone know anything about this?

 

two places google to find, sidewinder computers, very good shinitsu pads, and ait silver based pads. I found Ait on ebay and they have a site that they sell from. both work well when applied correctly.

 

30CMx3CMx0.3MM Thermal Pad CPU GPU DDR RAM CHIP XBOX360 - eBay (item 170577229945 end time Mar-08-11 18:27:09 PST)
Might be a little thin
Copper... man I have got you covered... I've been looking at tons of it
This is a good deal
K&S Copper Sheet Metal .025" Peggable (1) K+S5259 - eBay (item 360312821432 end time Feb-19-11 17:22:57 PST)
If you use thermal paste on both sides it will be the right thickness. Don't pay for something advertised as a "shim" on Ebay, its a ripoff, you can cut this with a pair of scissors.

 

Thanks for the replies chaps.

I replaced the CPU the other night, and in doing so the blue pad was noticably wrecked. I put it back together as a temporary measure, but the GPU temps are idling about 69C, which IIRC, is about +10C from how it was originally.


I've also ordered a 0.9mm copper shim, which (as mentioned) I'll use some artic silver 5 on both sides.

Would be great to see the temps fall to about 50C on the GPU.


Sadly, I noticed the the CPU runs about 7C hotter than the original TK55, which I'd managed to OC to 2.25Gz (from 1.8Ghz) just by pushing the FSB.
I tried the same on the new TL-64 CPU, and while it was stable, PRIME threw up errors straighaway.

Hopefully cooling the GPU will help to cool the CPU (remember they share the cooling copper bar and heat exchanger).

I'd be disappointed to upgrade the CPU significantly, but end up with a lower clock speed!! hahaha




Edit: Noticed you said don't buy a shim. Yep I could have bought a sheet of copper, but I've already bought a 2cmx2cm shim at 0.9mm thickness. It was only £3/$5 delivered though - so no harm done

 

I know why prime throws up errors (I think)

Try running the test that stresses the RAM more, then the one that stresses CPU more, I think you'll find that its your ram thats unstable
I tried upgrading from a ql-62 to an rm-77 and pretty much the same thing happened, I could get 2.5ghz with the ql-62 and like only 2.4ghz with the rm-77!

Heres why: the QL and TK are athlons, which are budget cpus. Coincidentally, they have a lower FSB to begin with, even if they are the same frequency E. G. tl-60 and ql-62.
The weird part is, with Intel CPUs or chipsets or something & when the FSB is a bit lower than what your chipset supports, the CAS of the RAM will automatically tighten and run as fast as possible (E. G. 1333mhz cas 9 ddr3 RAM will be cas7 @ 1066mhz) BUT for some reason AMD cpus don't do this.

So to conclude, yes the budget CPUs will overclock better and thats why you could OC the tk-55 so much, but its not the CPU that really is the issue its the RAM. Theres a way to fix it tho, on some laptops you can raise the CAS in the BIOS, but more likely you'll have to flash one stick of RAM to a a higher CAS. You can use a tool called Taiphoon burner to do it

I haven't actually done it with my AMD laptop, only on intel. If you want me to I'll try it again soon, maybe hit like 2.8ghz

 

I understood SOME of that :-D


I installed the copper shim, and the GPU is now 10C cooler. Once the Artic Silver 5 cures, it should be a couple better than that too.


I'm playing around with nTune at the moment, and it looks a lot more promising than before. CPU is running at 2.5Ghz right now

 

I tried the RAM test you mentioned, and sadly it made no difference.

With the exact same RAM settings, with the TK-55, I could push the FSB to 250 from 200 and it was perfectly stable.

With the TL-64, I can only get it to 215. At 220, Prime throws up an error after about 30 seconds.


Its a shame, as the idle temp on the CPU is about 50C, which should be fine. The GPU (since the copper mod) is now running 10C lower than ever.