26 Apr 2003, 15:54, JIM HOLSONBACK (1:123/140), wrote to MATT MC_CARTHY:

Hi JIM.

 JH> I did a bit of research at Thermaltake's website - - their "shim" 
 JH> for Athlon/Duron is BIR 0.6mm thick, copper, and it has cutouts for 
 JH> those 4 rubber pads, plus cutouts to miss the surface-mounted 
 JH> components on the chip's 'board'.  The purpose looks to be just to add
 JH> stabilization the heatsink over the chip, which would make some sense 
 JH> in the case of those heatsink/fan combos which just have the single 
 JH> clip-ons to the mainboard socket, at each end.  The mounting concept 
 JH> for some, like Thermaltake 6Cu+ I have here seems rather bizarre - - 
 JH> with a very strong spring/clip with 2-point attachment, over a cpu 
 JH> chip with a tiny metal plate over the die to send all that heat out, 
 JH> all on a single axis, with the big-butt heatsink and fan just kind of 
 JH> teeter-tottering over that 3-point axis. I guess the point of those 4 
 JH> small round rubber pads is to keep if from tipping too far to either 
 JH> side.

I'm going to have to take a look at their site also.  I really dislike that
"teeter totter" type design.  When installing them, ther's no way
to tell if you have a bit too much 'teeter' or too much 'totter', either of
which will result in a wedge shaped air space where you really want good
contact.
............

 MM>> The packaged Intel P-4s come with a "shim" also,
which appears to 
 MM>> be about a .003" thick lead strip covered with a thin brown 
 MM>> 'powdery' coating glued to the heatsink by it's edges.  Those 
 MM>> heatsinks are NOT for thin MBs though, as they are cam-latched to 
 MM>> the MB, and deflect the MB about an eighth inch when they are 
 MM>> locked down.  Intel warns that cheap MBs could become sufficiently 
 MM>> distorted to contact the metal case beneath the MB.

 JH> Ouch!  Sounds like another 'skating on thin ice' solution.  I'd 
 JH> have thought Intel would do better than that.  

There are no springs, in effect, the MB is the spring.  The cams pull the
MB up around the CPU.  

Still NOT perfect though.  Friday I had to upgrade a 1.8G P4 to a 2.4G, and
although every character printed on the top of the P4 could be read clearly
mirrored on the heatsink 'shim', there was still about 1/6th of the area in
one corner of the CPU that had never hit the heatsink.  :-((

 JH> That coating sounds like some of the "Bergquist material"
I've seen.  
 JH> Those may work well for one-shot installations, 

That fits the description...

 JH> but the Bergquist pad on bottom of Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu I took 
 JH> downtown to do some Athlon/Duron mainboard testing got pretty
 JH> much completely torn up and destroyed in the area of the "die" 
 JH> after a couple of installations and removals.  So we scraped it all 
 JH> off the other night, and now it is back to plain old white thermal 
 JH> grease.

We've got several around running well with plain old white thermal compound
for that same reason.


     Good luck...  M.

--- Msged/386 TE 06 (pre)