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Heatsink Modding DONE, HUGE improvment.

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enz660

enz660

Member
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Joined
Jul 1, 2006
Location
Canton, CT
This thread was just created to sum up all the mods ive done on my heatsink and show how much you can improve your cooling for a low cost.

1. Lap the CPU (mine was very concave)
2. Lap the Heatsink (stock had no finish and also was not flat)
3. Better thermal paste (went from as5 to Zalman Super thernal grease)
4. New, tighter mounting system
5. Add a larger fan (double of what stock fan could do at full speed)


Here was my original review of my new freezer 7 pro.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=479358

At that time, I was running at 3ghz, but when I put it up to 3.4ghz at 1.45voltage, the temps would reach almost 64c, and that was only orthos...If I used TAT, it would blow up lol.

Then I started a project where I would lap the heatsink and the cpu. I would also switch from as5 to the new zalman thermal grease.

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=480214

That mod gave me a huge improvment of almost 8c. My load temps were now at 56-57c.


Then, because of all the work I had done on the heatsink, I was constantly mounting and remounting it. I relalized that the mounting system was no good and I had to make something tighter. Also, I had a fan that pushed out 90cfm (double the 45cfm speed of stock fan) laying around, so I decided to slap that beast on as well

Here are some pix
nothermalmountingxz1.jpg


I used some rubber washers under the mobo and rubber spacers that came with my asus vento used to mount the hdd's.

thermalpasteandmountingscrewsee3.jpg

I made sure to put plenty of the zalman grease to ensure that every part of both cpu and heatsink would have good contact, and if it was too much, it would spread out by itself.

mountednewdc8.jpg

ALL DONE MOUNTING, I gave it a nice & tight fit.


bigfanug0.jpg


I couldnt find any more rubber bands and didnt have time to fabricate some better method of mounting the fan, So for now, only one rubber band is holding the fan in place.

This little modification dropped my temps a further 2c, my 3.4ghz conroe loads at 54c.




All in all, the temps were dropped by about 10c. WOW, thats a huge improvment from before when I was worried about overheating.

tempspf5.jpg






edit: in all my excitment, I forgot to plug my video card fan in. Lucky for me, its a v1 ultra and it can run passive just fine when its idle. Since its right next to the cpu heatsink, once I turned that on, it was sucking even more air out of it, and lowered the load temps to 52-53c.
 
Last edited:
Nice... I thought AS5 was the defacto #1 and didn't know there was better stuff out there... Also for the reatarded: don't lap a CPU that doesn't have the metal shield thingy on top and don't press too hard.
 
FudgeNuggets said:
Nice... I thought AS5 was the defacto #1 and didn't know there was better stuff out there... Also for the reatarded: don't lap a CPU that doesn't have the metal shield thingy on top and don't press too hard.
Click to expand...

Its called a IHS :)

I got a 21C drop from well cured AS5 and CPU lapping.
 
FudgeNuggets said:
Nice... I thought AS5 was the defacto #1 and didn't know there was better stuff out there... Also for the reatarded: don't lap a CPU that doesn't have the metal shield thingy on top and don't press too hard.
Click to expand...

LOL...lap the die...first one to finish gets a dead CPU :D
 
Well, its been at least a week since I applied...

Its got to have started curing by now.

Yes enz, im serious lol

Before I was around 60C load, now I @ 44 load!!!!!

I bet it has alot to do with the 66F room temprature though.
 
I'm interested in this Zalman grease. First time I'm hearing of it. Is it really better than AS5? It would have to be some insanely good stuff.

And does the directions say to use a lot? Conventional wisdom says use as little as possible, because the heatsinks copper transfers heat better than any paste.

In theory, a perfectly flat CPU and HSF would perform best without any paste at all. But since perfect is so hard to reach, you need a rice sized dab of TIM to fill the minute gaps.
 
damarble said:
I'm interested in this Zalman grease. First time I'm hearing of it. Is it really better than AS5? It would have to be some insanely good stuff.

And does the directions say to use a lot? Conventional wisdom says use as little as possible, because the heatsinks copper transfers heat better than any paste.

In theory, a perfectly flat CPU and HSF would perform best without any paste at all. But since perfect is so hard to reach, you need a rice sized dab of TIM to fill the minute gaps.
Click to expand...


There was a thread on it a while back, HUGE thread. It did beat out AS5 from what I remember. Very impressive.

I'll dig up the thread.
 
That does look very nice. I was going to lap my e6600 but since im going WC im thinking about taking off that ihs completely.
 
damarble said:
In theory, a perfectly flat CPU and HSF would perform best without any paste at all. But since perfect is so hard to reach, you need a rice sized dab of TIM to fill the minute gaps.
Click to expand...

Any type of abrasive (ie sand paper) simply reduces the size of the scratches in the surface. 200 grit leaves large scratches, and 1000 leaves very fine ones. They are still there though. When you reach a mirror finish they are microscopic but still there. The TIM has very very very fine particles that fill the microsocpic voids in the surface of the HS. It would be necessary even if they were perfactly flat, i can have a flat surface and it still be rough. Polishing to a mirror finish takes the ridges and cuts them off just like sand paper but it is a much finer grit than you can get on sand paper.
 
Albaholic said:
That does look very nice. I was going to lap my e6600 but since im going WC im thinking about taking off that ihs completely.
Click to expand...

I too will be going watercooling around the same time I get one of the new dx10 cards....since they produce so much heat anyways. How much do you think that will help If instead of lapping I just removed the heatspreader all together? Im too scared to do that lol :eek:
 
enz660 said:
I too will be going watercooling around the same time I get one of the new dx10 cards....since they produce so much heat anyways. How much do you think that will help If instead of lapping I just removed the heatspreader all together? Im too scared to do that lol :eek:
Click to expand...

Well in theory, its supposed to help quite a bit (provided you dont crush the core), because you dont have that stupid piece of metal in the way.
 
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