northbridge foam?

[Dubb]

Have almost all my parts, but I think I want to lap the northbridge heatsink on my p5ws64. if I take the foam pad off, I think I'll wind up destroying it - it's stuck on there pretty well.

what kind of foam is this stuff, is it something I can find at a hardware store? would electrical tape work jst as well?

Thanks!

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Dubb
Have almost all my parts, but I think I want to lap the northbridge heatsink on my p5ws64. if I take the foam pad off, I think I'll wind up destroying it - it's stuck on there pretty well.

what kind of foam is this stuff, is it something I can find at a hardware store? would electrical tape work jst as well?

Thanks!

Foam? You mean "thermal tape"?
If yes, there is no point in lapping if you are going to use thermal tape.

Or, is there a protective elastic pad surrounding the contact area you are talking about?
That should only be stuck to the chipset module and not the sink!

Do you have a picture?

 

[Dubb]

it's foam, stuck to the sink...not thermal tape. to protect the resistors around the die, I assume. I'd love to take it off, lap the HS, and put it back, but it's glued on.

 

[Navid]

You are right now I remember.

1- Are you sure your chipset is limiting your overclock? If not, you have nothing to gain by doing this. So, don't!

2- If you have decided to do it, get a clean plastic card with a shiny surface that you can spare. It could be one of those cards that supermarkets give you for collecting points when you shop there. Clean the surface.
Carefully peel off the foam without breaking it and stick it to the plastic surface. If you use plastic, you can peel it off again. It will eventually break after you do this multiple times. But, it should survive a few times.
Do the lapping. Put the foam back on.

 

[dawza]

If the foam pad is anything like those on NB heatsinks I have seen, it is probably a shim that is meant to protect the core from cracking during installation of the sink by distributing mounting force more evenly. If so, you will be OK without it, so long as you take extra care when re-mounting the HS.

I second what Navid wrote about the value of lapping- probably will do nothing for temps, which are highly unlikely to be limiting in OCing to begin with. You can probably improve heat transfer by cleaning off the stock TIM and replacing with any of the several high-quality thermal compounds available, but take extra care not to get any TIM on the surrounding circuitry.