Ok to Sandpaper and Polish Heatsinks?

Hi, is it ok to use sandpaper and polish (e.g. Brasso) on the CPU and GPU heatsinks for Clevo laptops too?

If so, which parts of the heatsinks are ok?

Thanks!

 

Uh, I don't think sandpaper is even close to be a good idea... same with polishes...

I would use a microfiber cloth along with isopropyl alcohol.

 

Hmm, yeah, maybe that is so cos of the amount of time needed?

 

I've done it with very fine grit abrasive paper - 4000 and above and wrapped around a small block of wood. It made no difference to the temps once done but it also didn't make anything worse. I wouldn't bother - apply CLU if you fancy doing something with your heatsinks. For general cleaning, alcohol and coffee filters have worked well enough for me.

If you're doing it to make it shiny - you could probably do all of the bits which don't come into contact with the C/GPU.

 

I went with the rubbing alcohol and tissue paper; seems fine so far

 

Sanding the heatsink will reduce mounting pressure which could cause temperatures to rise.

 

Thankfully I didn't go ahead with that

 

Bringin back a zombie, sorry.
I read here that Clevos have flatness problems sometimes. Wouln't sanding fix that?
BTW, hyperbook offers heatsink polishing as an option, for ~45€.

 

I asked hyperbook about this option. I got a quick reply:

TBH I'm not impressed.
Accoriding to
http://www.overclockers.com/why-heatsink-polishing-might-be-a-bad-idea/
mirror-polishing is not a good thing.

Flatness improvement OTOH is great, especially that Clevo heatsinks have sometimes problems with it. But when done carelessly, polishing can make the heatsink convex and hurt badly.

Hyperbook doesn't mention flatness at all, which makes me wonder how do they do it....


Nevertheless, I consider polishing the heatsink myself. Does anyone have further comments on whether it's worthwhile and how to do it right?

 

I have never "lapped" a laptop heatsink before but I recently found some imperfections on my Hyper 212 I was using on a new build. Unfortunately I don't remember the results, I also used a new thermal paste at the same time so the gain I got wasn't all due to the lapping. It also wasn't enough to cool my 7700K so I went with an AIO. I didn't go to the mirror stage as I didn't have the 2000 grit and my goal was just to smooth out the imperfections. I found a random you tube video and it starts off OK but I use a figure 8 pattern as opposed to his method of rotating the heat sink. The figure 8 pattern evenly distributes pressure as you go. I didn't watch the entire video so I don't know what his conclusion was but it covers the basiscs.

I took some pics when I did mine, there are before after and during, if you look close enough you can see the swirl indicating the figure 8 pattern.

 

You do have to be careful with those direct contact heatpipes when lapping.

What I said before applies, you could end up lowering your contact pressure. Therefore you might need to adjust the backplate or similar along with the lapping.

 

Obsidian PC polishes too. I'll ask them about it later.

 

Obsidian PC's replied to me immediately:

I felt skeptical they would go on with soldering with an €0 option, so I asked for pictures. I'm waiting for the answer this time.

 

Well there´s a good reason why we do not mention soldering, i´ll explain!
Not all models need it, not all coolers need it!!
If you take 10 clients and ask them to disassemble the units some will find a modded cooler others won´t.
The point of modding the cooler is to get the best contact possible. So for us, the most important thing we need to do is CHECK it, measure it, test it.
After checking we will know if we need to mod it or not.
Previous generations was almost 100% need, current generation not so much.

I´ve sent guides and made posts where we explain pretty much everything.

So first thing you should do if you want to improve it at home is assemble the unit with regular thermal paste in a appropriate quantity. Then disassemble it and look at the cooler and CPU, check if it did in fact spread good, if not you need to correct the gap.

How to correct the gap:
a) SOLDERING COPPER - The soldering process was sent to @Mr. Fox and some others, i think Fox was going to make a video.
b) Adding Copper Shims to make up for the gap - easy way - 0.5mm should be the measure that fits most of the cases.

To keep improving let´s move to delid:
Delidding a CPU is something everyone can do, buy a tool, do it! Easy and plenty of information available.
If like us you are going to use liquid metal in the die then just be sure to SEAL the IHS with high temperature silicon.

Polishing the contact zones:
You can do it on both the IHS and COOLER, but probably do this before checking gaps.
The all purpose of polishing it is just to remove oxidation, grooves and scratches that can be find in the stock cooler.

Warning:
For the love of GOD don´t use liquid metal between the IHS and Cooler unless you know what you are doing, it´s so easy for it to slide out and short your motherboard.

Pictures of any process have probably been sent out to forum members. They are worth little to nothing, what you should ask for is guides i´m sure. We usually avoid doing those because this type of stuff took us HOURS and HOURS to test and do, and it sucks when some other reseller just goes to their website and type "We do THIS also and THAT and blablabla" even if it´s BS. TRUST we have been victims of it... but then again i just don´t care!
Our clients are not returning their units, in fact we sell a lot of units to clients who returned theirs to other resellers.

At the end of the day what we promise is "Your units will not throttle, your unit will have decent temperatures, we will show you how good they are before sending the unit to you". What we do to achieve that is a ever changing process.

I would never advise someone to buy a laptop based on what the brand says, don´t go by "We do this and that" go by other user experiences, ask them. Ask us "What temperatures will i get, show me printscreens and assure i will get a unit performing the same as those screenshots"

There´s a lot more we could add to our product descriptions, like:
- "Use our APP to apply a TS Profile and get more performance and less heat"
- "In-House improved BIOS"
- "Prema BIOS for NBR forum members"
- "Our logos are more Metal then the latest Opeth Albums"
- "We actually do chassis mods - Some units have this weird noises when you click the touchpad and other stuff like that, we actually remove those" - N850 and N240...
- The list goes on... but i don´t have time for all that marketing / bragging stuff when i have stuff to do, like code our APP to make it even better.


Here you go:

A Stock cooler (it´s not even one of the worst i´ve seen):




Cleaned UP:




An example of a soldered cooler, in this one we solder a thin copper shim (we have many sizes).


Feel free to ask anything else!

 

Great info, thanks!

 

Yes. I am waiting for an extra heat sink to work with as a prototype, and I had an extra question for Ricardo (just asked him something last night). And, yes... I am planning to do a demo video. I know @Ted@HIDevolution and @Donald@HIDevolution are looking forward to that video as well. Thanks for all that you and OBSIDIAN PC do that makes the world a better place for notebook enthusiasts. You are truly awesome, bro.

 

PS. Well this is another one of those posts that seems to immediate generate questions from members:
"Aren´t you guys afraid other stores copy your stuff"
We get this question for topics like this one and for the fact we are publishing code for our app @ github. So instead of replying to PMs let me write it here

Let me reply to that. If someone copies everything we do at this very moment they would still be one year behind everything we are doing and plan on doing.

Good stores don´t need to copy us, they are already doing a great work. On the other hand those little clumsy stores that keep saying either we are full of "BS" or that they also do all of that and then will even sell you cheaper, well, good for them... at the end of the day bad stores will have the clients returning the units and those same clients will run to good and honest stores to buy.

And to add to this, here´s a thought, how can you NOT help the community when you have people like @Mr. Fox , @Donald@HIDevolution , @Meaker@Sager , @Prema , @Phoenix , @unclewebb and many others, who spends countless hours doing good work for all of us.
Not only do i gain sales on this forum but i also gain knowledge and awareness about problems.

So you don´t need to ask that question anymore... we help any store, competitor or not, if they reach out to us and they good guys here.

 

And, this is just one example of why you are so awesome and respected. I will ALWAYS choose to give my business to companies like yours, HIDevolution and Eurocom. If it were not for the efforts of companies like yours things would be far more messed up than we could ever imagine. You guys dare to defy the status quo and push the envelope. Those clumsy (lazy and lame, I might add,) little stores are a scourge that need to either get with the program or go away. They are an impediment and doing the rest of us no favors by keeping their doors open.

 

John,

Do you guys sell to the US? If so I know where I'll be getting my next laptop from


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I don´t think it would be worth it for you.
If you add shipping and possible taxes it might be too much, i don´t know.
When you buy from outside the US do you have to pay customs fees? If so you should check how much is it, as for shipping i can try to get you a quote.
Still i would also recommend you to check the fantastic work that HID is doing in the US!

 

John, if you're soldering a spacer and delidding anyway, wouldn't you be better off without a heatspreder?

 

Direct die contact would be ideal for thermal efficiency, but you would have to do an additional mod to have something to hold the CPU in the socket. With the IHS removed there is nothing to secure the CPU. The pressure of the heat sink might be enough, but you would have to be meticulous with the modding or the risk of damage and malfunction could be pretty great. Having nothing to secure the CPU to the socket other than heat sink pressure could present multiple challenges. Things like chassis flex and impact shocks could have disastrous consequences.

The other consideration would be structural integrity of the CPU. The Sky Lake and Kaby Lake CPUs have a thinner PCB. The "heat spreader" is also a "load spreader" so if you do not have an IHS distributing the load, you might end up warping the PCB and distorting the pins underneath it if there is too much flex in the PCB.

 

Understood, thanks.
ADDED:
How about shaving the top of the heatsink and leaving just a frame to hold the CPU?

 

That could work if you had the tools to do it.

 

I happen to have some thin copper shims, how do I know if I need them?

 

Basically your temperatures will suck - Assuming you've also tuned the machine. Usually it's pretty easy to confirm if the heatsink is making poor or uneven contact if you inspect the TIM spread on a tear down.

 

This!!!!

You are correct.

"How about shaving the top of the heatsink and leaving just a frame to hold the CPU?" -> There you guys go giving me more crazy ideas.

 

Considering how much more notebooks are moved around than desktops I would say running without an IHS would be a BAD idea.

 

I have to agree. Any temporary benefit might be overshadowed by a disastrous ending.

 

Direct die has little impact if the delid is handled properly too. A soldered IHS is the best of course but that's going to be tricky to pull off, with AMD I think they see a 0.5-1C difference to direct die lol.

 

Very tricky:
http://overclocking.guide/the-truth-about-cpu-soldering/

 

I'll check this out the next time I do a tear down

 

That could be solved with some more cores in a higher end SKU

 

Aren't BGA chips naked die?

 

Yes the heatsinks are designed for that, the mobile systems that have desktop chips should not be run bare die.

 

And what are the differences? I wonder if it would be possible to mod a heatsink further to make it safe...

 

You could look to see if you find Spacer for Intel Kaby Lake and Skylake CPUs Even make one yourself. Othe name for it is Delid Die Guard.


But please, Dont MESS UP LIKE THIS

 

Many years ago such shims were somewhat popular, but they got bad rep for too low manufacturing precision. That's not what is being used in BGA, is it?

 

BGA = Bare Die and Heatsink.

 

Yeah. Meaker@Sager has said that the heatsinks are somewhat different, so they are safe w/out such shims. It would be nice to know what's the difference.

 

Oh my god, your app is open-source?! Awesome!! That was literally my ONLY suggestion for it, then I read your comment and now I am really happy.