Vaio Z11 Thermal Paper on Top of Graphics Card

Hi guys, does anyone know the part number for the white paper square that goes on top of the nVidia graphics card? I ripped it off today thinking the dark gray part in the middle was dry thermal compound. I put thermal compound on top of it hoping it would fix it, but now when I switch to Speed mode, the laptop dies within a minute from (I'm guessing) heat (not that it wouldn't die easily before anyway - I couldn't even be hooked up to the TV and playing a movie for 30 minutes without the laptop cutting power). Anyway, is the square paper thing a common thermal control thing I can buy anywhere or will I need to order it from Sony? Just for the record, it was a square paper-like item with white borders and a sort of rubbery gray middle that sat on top of the chip itself. The white borders surrounded the chip.

Thank you!

 

The thing you ripped off was the thermal pad. Grey thermal pad in the middle, surrounded by insulating paper presumably intended to prevent the heatsink from shorting the components surrounding the GPU.

The solution that you are looking for is discussed fairly comprehensively in the following thread. http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/594314-vpc-z-change-thermal-paste.html

To summarise, the thermal pad is thicker than the paste on the CPU because the gap between the GPU and heatsink is greater (nVidia probably made the GPU with a lower profile than the design guys at Sony expected). Simply putting paste there does not work. You need to fill the gap with something thermally conductive, like a copper shim (small 2 cm x 2 cm square of high purity copper sheet 0.5mm thick). You need to coat this with thermal paste on both sides and put it between the GPU and the heatsink.

 

I just discovered that thread about an hour ago and ordered this a minute ago:
1x Thermal Copper Shim for Asus G1 G1S GPU to Resolve Overheat Issues 0 5mm | eBay

Did I order too small of a size? The one I got is 1.4cm x 1.5cm x 0.05cm.

 

No, as long as it is larger than the GPU itself it is fine. You'll need to be bit more careful positioning it, though, and make sure it doesn't move off the GPU when the heatsink is fitted.