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How bad was this done?

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curtis1552

Member
Joined
Aug 26, 2007
Location
Dayton, Ohio
I recently picked up a computer for 10$.
In my re-purposing it, I removed the heatsink (which came off the CPU really easily), wiped the thermal paste off it, then off the heatsink, which revealed a slightly bumpy and pitted surface, with imprints from the hole in the processor (P4 SL6EV - it has a hole in it).
Upon quick further investigation revealed a piece of aluminium foil attached to the heatsink with thermal paste. It doesn't look like it was homemade, but machine cut for this purpose.

My question is WTH? Was it suposed to be like this?

I know i'm going to have to check how well it seats when I replace it, but damn, that's just wierd.
 
There should not be aluminum foil between the IHS and the heatsink. I'm baffled why someone or some company would do that.
 
A lot of OEMS do that. I have come across at least 10-12 machines like that. It is a foil cover over the thermal compound, which acts like a Thermal Pad. If I remember right, many emachines had that system in the early P4 and Athlon XP days.
 
A lot of OEMS do that. I have come across at least 10-12 machines like that. It is a foil cover over the thermal compound, which acts like a Thermal Pad. If I remember right, many emachines had that system in the early P4 and Athlon XP days.

The man speaks the truth.

I always figured the foil acted like wax-paper to keep the sinks from sticking to everything during shipping/manufacture. Since it's foil, OEMs could get away with not removing it like they'd have to with paper. Just slap er on there and be done with it. NEXT!
 
the foil is actually used as a medium to put the thermal paste on... its much easier for oems to cut the "tape" with TIM pre applied. most heatsinks from the p4 478 era are going to having something like this.
 
My compaq laptop with a Turion had the same thing on the core (no IHS). I've seen dumb things on mobo sinks, way too much paste and even none at all, but this shocked me to see something like this on a cpu.
 
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That very issue caused me to build my first pc many moons ago. Lol. Cyix 266 baby 32 mb of ram, 2gig hdd. Now we're talkin'. Lol
 
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