lapped?

[YMAN]

What does everyone mean by lapped? :(

[Rooster]

most heatsinks are not perfectly flat. so you sand the bottum to get it flat. also can be done to the core of your cpu

[dimmreaper]

Here, go check out my lapping guide.

http://www.wildandyc.co.uk/lapping.htm

Contrary to my lapping guide, many folks will claim that you can hurt performance by using sandpaper finer than 600grit. I have noticed that I neither gain nor loose performance when using paper finer than 600grit, so It can't hurt if you have got the time to polish it to a high luster.

Also, some people are claiming that it is better to lap with arctic silver heatsink compound on the paper, I think this is a terible waste of expensive compound. Some will disagree with me I'm sure, but I didn't notice any benefit when I tried it.

The guide says to use alcohol to clean the heatsink, it works OK, but I have been using toilet bowl cleaner more recently with a barely noticeble improvement in temps. Full load temps are the same, but it takes about 10 seconds longer to reach the highest temp. This IMHO indicates that their is an ever so slight increase in performance, one that can not be measured in a single degree but rather a small fraction of a degree. So I recommend that you go that way if you have any toilet bowl cleaner.

[Monaco]

The actual meaning is to grind, sand, and polish a surface down to a very smooth, flat mirror finish. We use it to mean "flattening the base of a heatsink so it makes better contact with the CPU's core"

A very easy way to lower your temperatures. Of course, if the base of your heatsink was very flat to start with you won't notice much of an improvement. You do not need to make it a mirror finish BTW. At the very least, sand off ALL the anodization( coloring) down to bare metal.

To do it find a very flat surface- I use leftover marble from my countertops. Get several grits of sandpaper, I use 220, 400, 600, place on the marble, and go to it- I go in circles to be sure I don;t miss a spot. If you want that mirror finish you'll need to wet sand up to 1500 or so. I don't find that it makes much difference over stopping at 600, but that's just me.

Well that was pretty long winded- hope it was helpful.

[Cu]

So can the same method be used on a copper waterblock?

[dimmreaper]

Originally posted by Cu
So can the same method be used on a copper waterblock? Yes, it can be used with any device thats function is to get remove heat from an integrated circuit . . .