Dell 2007 Latitude Laptop Northbridge - Copper Shim Thickness

[Vario]

I repasted my Dell Latitude D530 with good results, 20*C reduction in CPU temperature. However I didn't have any thermal tape available to do the northbridge correctly, instead I put a huge blob of thermal paste. A few weeks later, I am having some occasional instability with explorer and firefox, it could be caused by memory issues (northbridge).

I am willing to tear it apart and do it with a copper shim to fill the gap but I am unsure as to the thickness. I am not sure how thick the thermal tape was, maybe 1mm? I don't want to crush the NB chip with a shim that is too thick.

Does anyone have a thickness suggestion? Otherwise I'll just buy some thermal tape.
Thank you.

edit:
I am looking at thermal pads,
Are the generic blue colored pads on ebay legit? Or should I be buying the 3m brand 8810/8815 stuff that is a lot more money.
Has anyone ever tried Thermagon 6100?

 

[Doc41]

if you still want to try shims you can start with 1mm, i have done a few laptops and results were OK, and i don't think there is enough pressure on a laptop HS to crack chips.

but as for pads i have no experience with brand ones but i do have some "well generic" blue and white ones from a chinese site and they work fine i guess

 

[Vario]

if you still want to try shims you can start with 1mm, i have done a few laptops and results were OK, and i don't think there is enough pressure on a laptop HS to crack chips.

but as for pads i have no experience with brand ones but i do have some "well generic" blue and white ones from a chinese site and they work fine i guess

I ended up ordering some of the generic blues thank you for the help.

 

[Vario]

Generic blue stuff wasn't good enough, actually ran really hot.

I took some sheetmetal I had lying around and cut a square, deburred it a bit, lapped it a bit with some 1000 grit and then put it on the nb.

NB - X23 paste - Sheetmetal -X23- Heatsink

My temps are so much better now.

The max temps are with prime 95 for 10 minutes! Figured a little short burn in would help adhere the shim.

Laptop now runs like new and much faster than before. I don't have intermittent crashes or weird colors and artifacts.

 

[Doc41]

Heatsink design probably didn't have enough pressure for a pad to work so it ended up insulating instead....
what i don't understand is why don't OEM's make the HS directly touch chipsets and GPU's just like the CPU in the first place

well glad it worked for you now

 

[jsfitz54]

You can use bare aluminum roof flashing material, it comes in a roll. You could buy a small piece of step flashing.
I am writing this on a Gateway laptop that had a bad thermal pad on the graphics chip and the combined cpu/gpu cooler had a gap on the all aluminum gpu side.

I cut a small piece of aluminum square, just the size of the gpu die, and applied a small amount of non conductive thermal paste to the die, then seated the aluminum square, then applied small amount of paste and seated the cooler.

I've never had an issue since.

 

[Vario]

You can use bare aluminum roof flashing material, it comes in a roll. You could buy a small piece of step flashing.
I am writing this on a Gateway laptop that had a bad thermal pad on the graphics chip and the combined cpu/gpu cooler had a gap on the all aluminum gpu side.

I cut a small piece of aluminum square, just the side of the gpu die, and applied a small amount of non conductive thermal paste to the die, then seated the aluminum square, then applied small amount of paste and seated the cooler.

I've never had an issue since.

Yes thats exactly where I got the sheet metal from, a roll of aluminum flashing.

I did the same as you. Works great!

Laptop is working fine besides some really dumb Vista (The default OS) issues, so I installed lubuntu.