Good thermal pad brand?

Hi, I need to replace the thermal pad on my laptop's northbridge after it got torn when i lifted the heatpipe to upgrade the cpu (half stuck to heatsink, half stuck to northbridge)

i removed it completely and tried using MX-3 thermal paste in its place, but i guess it's not making good contact because my THRM temps have jumped from 74 to 85

thanks in advanced

 

Make sure the gap is filled.
Use a Copper Mod if you have to.

 

it's hard to tell if there's a gap or not, i take off the heatpipes and its just a mess... i've tried both pea method and spread method with the paste... just got a max of 90 degrees! but fan kicked in luckily and it's at 82 with orthos running

thanks though, i'll look into whether i can do a shim or copper block

 

Weird. Even with a horrendously messy paste job it shouldn't be that bad. MX-3 doesn't lose as much performance if it's put on thick like AS5. And since you said it's a mess, there's some kind of contact being made.

I'll echo what Weinter said. Try for a copper shim.

As for pads, I've used these 1mm Bergquist pads on both my GPU memory and northbridge, and they worked great.

 

thanks Forge, i'll try that

i just put the old torn pad back on, running orthos for 15minutes and THRM maxed out at 80, leveled off at 75-76.

I suspect my paste was not making good contact with the northbridge, i was a little hesitant to put on too much from fear of it oozing around the die too much.

Forge, what THRM tempratures do you get with your T9900 running orthos?

p.s. do you think this will be a sufficient pad replacement? saves me from waiting for it to get shipped since i can pick it up locally:

StarTech.com Heatsink Thermal Pads (HSFPHASECM) in Canada - Fast Shipping 1.866.800.8060

 

I'm not sure about my temperatures. I haven't run OCCT Linpack--which tortures the CPU harder than Orthos--in a while, and I'm working on something so I don't feel like running it for a test, but I think my CPU mid 70s with my T9900 undervolted to 1.188v, while the chipset was just barely hitting 80.


And looking at the description of the pad, I wouldn't get it. Looks like a phase change pad--I think that's the term--and I don't like things like that. Find something that won't liquefy at higher temperatures and it should be fine.

 

Cool, thanks for the pro tip.

btw, i think i fixed it!

the reason why i was getting insane THRM temps was because my engineering sample T9500 that i ripped outta my dell was running at 1.25v!!!!!

I figured out it should be running at 1.15v thanks to intel processor finder and set it to the appropriate voltage using Crystal CPUID

soon as i dropped the voltage to what it was supposed to be, the temps fell from 77 to 71, took the bottom panel off and now it's at 64... 29 min orthos run

for some strange reason intelburn test won't run, it completes in 0.11 seconds, i think it doesn't recognize this engineering sample chip

i'm really happy, now hopefully i can enjoy my laptop after 1+ week of tweaking and upgrading after i got it. i will try the copper mods you guys discussed and the backpanel mods in the future too, thanks for all the invaluable help