Originally posted by: ConcillianShims were useful before AMD started putting those little foam rubber dots on the CPU. Since then, not so much.
I think most of hte shims sold now do not fit a barton core.
Those "dots" have always been on socket A CPUs, AFAIK. I remember seeing them on Duron 600 chips running on AMD 760 chipset motherboards. The shims sold now will fit Barton cores just fine. A buddy of mine always uses shims, but that's because he's pretty sloppy with heatsinks and has almost made a habit of killing socket A CPUs. So far he's killed one by using way too much AS3 and has killed
THREE by cracking/crushing the core on CPUs without shims.
I don't think shims do anything for cooling because they are often a hair thinner than the core. They are great for protecting the core from a heatsink that is installed or removed at an angle.
FWIW I don't use shims on anything except Shuttle XPC systems.