thermal paste and heatsinks for notebooks?

hey all, i am not sure exactly where to put this thread but i figured this may be a good spot. I was just wondering if anyone has used thermal pastes or found any heatsinks that work well with laptops. Or if they even make heatsinks for that matter. I would really like to find a way to spread out the heat generated by my RAM on my i6000. Any ideas? Thanks all!

 

You already have a heatsink. If you want to use a beter thermal paste, you can, something like Arctic Silver would be a good place to start. That will void the warranty though, if that's a concern.

 

Thermal paste yes, I've used it on my Laptop since you can't really replace a laptop heatsink. Is it better? Not as good as a laptop cooler. I've never heard of anyone putting ram heatsinks in thier laptop before but that's probably because there's not a lot of air movment inside the case.

 

I see no point in RAM heat spreaders:
a- No air movement to get the heat out (as someone mentioned).
b- The physical design of the interior of most laptops prohibits thicker modules, ex: mine has the 2 slots over each others.

As for Arctic Silver 5. I used it on mine. Their was a bit of a drop, about 2 degrees, nothing too important. I guess the orginal epoxy paste wasn't that bad to start with. Some other brands/models may benifit more from it.

 

In my older Dell I replaced the "thermal pad" they had supplied with some generic thermal paste. Temps easily fropped 10-20C @ max load. The thermal pad Dell had supplid was essentially justa a strip of aluminum foil and some hardened puddy...was causing overheating problems.

If you want to make your heatsink "better", you may consider lapping it. This voids the warranty as someone else said. If you don't know what lapping a heatsink is then just Google it. Esentially it smoothes the copper/aluminum surface of the heatsink and makes for better contact with the CPU, allowing for a better transfer of heat and cooler temps. I do this with ALL my desktop heatsinks, and it almost always improves temps and stops overheating.

 

I agree with qwester. Heat spreaders don't really do much although some say they do. They might in desktop systems on certain modules under certain applications like overclocking and stressing your modules using high voltages, but under normal use, no benefit.

Even overclocked ram under high voltages should be fine without heatspreaders as long as there's good airflow.

Cheers,
Mike

 

Some RAM sinks actually trap in heat if not properly air cooled. With my OCZ's they seem to work well though, even at 3.5v they were somewhat warm, where as some sticks would be fire hot. I keep my RAM under an 80mm fan though, not possible in a notebook. They are generally just for show, especially in cases with lights and windows. Mine are the "gold" series and reflective enough to use as a mirror, looks cool to me.

 

Hey all thanks for the valuable info!