The base where the HS makes contact the heat spreader of my chip was not smooth at all, it's actually grooved! You can see a scratch which is where I gently ran my thumb nail over the surface; I could feel the rough edges. Have a look for yourself: Anyway, others encouraged me to lap it which I've never done before. After wrestling with the idea for a couple of days as well as reading many articles/guides, I decided to give it a go. Plug: wrote a great guide for HS lapping. $20 worth of sandpaper, a $2 piece of flat glass, and 4 hours of careful work (and sweat) later, I was left with a pretty darn flat HS. You can see by the pictures that this particular one was quite concave instead of being flat which isn't good for keeping contact between the HS and IHS of the CPU. Did it work you're probably wondering. The temp data as measured in speedfan.exe for a ~1 h x264 encode (uses all 4 cores with a CPU load of >99 %). I had speedfan log the temps (which it does every 3-4 seconds) and I averaged the whole data set per core for the 2nd pass of the 2-pass encode (the 2nd pass is the most CPU intensive). Room temp for both experiments was ~23 °C. By the way, I added a constant of 15 to each core in speedfan since it incorrectly displays temps for quads by 15 °C. System specs: Q6600 @ 9x333=3.01 GHz (stock voltage), P5B-Deluxe in an Antec p182 case. Code: Before lapping the HS: Core 0: 66.9 Core 1: 66.4 Core 2: 60.6 Core 3: 60.6 After lapping the HS: Core 0: 64.9 Core 1: 64.4 Core 2: 59.0 Core 3: 59.4 Delta: Core 0: 2.0 Core 1: 2.0 Core 2: 1.6 Core 3: 1.2 I got a MUCH larger drop in temps after lapping the IHS on the Q6600. Lapping both the base of the HS and the IHS of the chip is best.
Nice. At least you didn't mirror finish it. When lapping, mirror finish isn't really needed. You just want it as flat and smooth as possible. Good job!
Agreed. Too many people seem to go out and buy a can of brass-o with their sandpaper... big mistake as brass-o has horrible thermal dissipation properties
Cool on the lapping Graysky I have never tried it I can't read Chinese either Mike I pinged Chai he can
Nice lap...dance? No seriously though, nice one. I have been seriously thinking about doing my xp120...I should get off my lazy but and do it already heh.
I am seriously considering doing this with my Katana2 and see what happens. Graysky takes his time on these things and I trust his results more than I would a link to another forum
There is a reason why Thermalright started making their heatsink bases convex, all of them used to be flat. The main purpose is to concentrate all the mounting pressure on the center of the IHS, at the cost of consistency in mountings; you need to attempt a few mounts to get the most optimal temperature, it's all about trial and error. Does it do better than a flat base? Yes, definitely. It's been tested and proven many times in XS My WB Testing Results, Excel file inside. - XtremeSystems Forums Swiftech is the first to ship their waterblocks with convex base (Apogee GT/GTX), after that I started seeing Thermalright doing the same thing on their TRUE. EK also does the same thing on their latest EK Supreme CPU waterblock. When Thermalright started shipping their TRUE with convex base, many went "OMGWTF has gone wrong with their QC!" and started lapping their heatsinks No seriously, don't lap these convex bases unless you are using a processor without IHS. Some reading on "bowing" aka convex base The anatomy of a 'bow'. - XtremeSystems Forums CPU block lapping - XtremeSystems Forums
Makes sense and thanks for the info. Even though I am getting around 44C under load on the cores of my E6550 with the Hyper212 I still think there are "hot spots" on the die and this may be why. Same with the Katana2 on the Celeron. May try it first with the Katana2 as that isn't my main machine and it can be down for a few days.
Good job, I just lapped the liquid cooling block on my CPU and GPU, I might be going flourinert soon so it might be wasted effort but oh well.