Anyone ever stack up thermal pads?

R

redman223

Gawd
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Oct 28, 2006
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Sounds dumb I would imagine, BUT, I have no other choice.

For some reason, it seems that thermal pads are impossible to find in various sizes. Sure they are out there, but it takes forever to find them.

I was sent a thermal pad for a GPU cooler and it is too thin, as the chip and the heatsink and not touching. There is a gap there that is killing performance.

They supplied a 1.3mm pad, but it will need to be about 2mm to work perfect. Problem is, I cannot find any that size! I have some 1mm pads lying around and if I put one on top of the other pad it should fit fine.

My question is if it will affect the temperatures at all, in comparison to using a 2mm pad?
 
It's possible that it may have "less" performance compared to a 2mm pad but it would still be better performance than having a gap between the gpu and heatsink.
 
Yeah Its too bad that they made it like that.

The cooler in question is the Accelero Xtreme 8800 for the G80 cards. Awesome cooler, too bad that a single thermal pad ruined its performance. I guess I will put the 1mm pad on top of the supplied pad, and will just order some 2.5mm pads from ebay, though I think they might be too big. I say that because I bought some pads from ebay before (thats where I got the 1mm pads) and they do no "give" at all, they are fairly dense, whereas the ones that came with the cooler are pretty squishy.
 
I gotta go with JamesL on this one - a dose of Arctic Silver is WAY better than pads any day, just tighten up the rig from the backside with washers till it is snug - it should save you plenty of degC
 
You mean putting washers underneath the screws from the back side of the PCB right? That way the screws will pull the heatsink down further? I will have to look for some tiny washers...I'll hit up ACE tomorrow when I get out of class.

However, there is no way you could avoid using the thermal pads on this heatsink, as there is way too much room in between the chips and the heatsink surface. The memory pads are 3.5mm thick!

The reviews for this cooler put it above the HR-03 Plus though, so these pads must work decent, if you can get them to fit.
 
oops! with regular metal washers - and ACE does have plenty that are REALLY tiny - I would use silicon or plastic spacer-rings up against the PCB so you don't have to worry about getting any electrical interference or grounding - about half of my mobos came with some in the hardware kit. That's sure what I would try - I haven't seen one of these coolers 1st person - got any pix you can post at photobucket or imageshack for us?
 
Ok, so the washer trick worked, I stacked 2 on top of each other, tightened down the screws and now the thermal pad is touching the heatsink. Thanks for the suggestions.

Too bad I just sent my 680i to EVGA to step-up to the 780i. I wont be able to test the new coolers out until next week sometime.
 
that's the way the crumble bounces LOL - as an afterthought, if you ever get to lapping the cooler, all you need is another washer! HAHA - p.s. LMK how everything works out
 
Well the coolers do a decent job of cooling the cards. I am able to run 648 core 1458 shader and 999 memory on ATI tool without any artifacting. Also, I have had no lockups in any games (the important test), so it gets the full stability stamp from me.

Before I was able to run 621/1458/1008.
 
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