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Heatsink polishing - bad idea?

S

Sadisterr

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 1, 2013
43
1
Just found this and I think it is pretty interesting.
Anyone interested in lapping/polishing heatsinks or improving overall efficiency of MBPs cooling, read on.
http://www.overclockers.com/why-heatsink-polishing-might-be-a-bad-idea/



Alternatively, you can read this too: http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?441460-Heatsink-Lapping-Guide

This second guy says NO to polishing too, but for different reasons. Also he recommends different and much finer grit sands, as opposite to the guy in the first link.

I believe this is a good thing to discuss, especially with people who knows better in these areas than average joe.

In my point of view, the best would be to smooth/polish the hell out of the heatsink to make the best perfect flat smooth surface you can get and add NO thermal paste at all, just nice contact between two metal surfaces. But I guess it is not really possible to do so in the home amateur environment.
 
Are you dealing with excessive heat issues now?

If not, i'd avoid such drastic measures as that. Back in the day, I replaced the thermal grease with some higher end stuff but the change in temps was 5c at best.

There are some cases where this will help, but for the most part you'll probably not see a huge improvement. The risk vs reward ratio is skewed to the risk for very little reward.
 
maflynn said:
Are you dealing with excessive heat issues now?

If not, i'd avoid such drastic measures as that. Back in the day, I replaced the thermal grease with some higher end stuff but the change in temps was 5c at best.

There are some cases where this will help, but for the most part you'll probably not see a huge improvement. The risk vs reward ratio is skewed to the risk for very little reward.
Click to expand...


I do, that is the point of my internet (re)searching these days. I actually did thermal paste re-application few times and saw little to no improvement at all, but while other people with same MBP as I have usually see better results than I do, Iam trying to improve what I can, on my own.
 
If the computer is in warranty, I'd have them check it out first.

What temps are you dealing with and what kind of loads, i.e., 70c just using Safari, or 85c while encoding video, using Flash and rendering in PS :)
 
maflynn said:
If the computer is in warranty, I'd have them check it out first.

What temps are you dealing with and what kind of loads, i.e., 70c just using Safari, or 85c while encoding video, using Flash and rendering in PS :)
Click to expand...

No it is not, otherwise I'd do it.

It's reaching 105C on CPU while playing some more demanding games under Mavericks and almost 100C on GPU doing the same. I usually stop at that point to prevent damage. I also use fans control SW to keep my fans 6200 while doing something intensive, but that does not help. Under Bootcamp, I have to keep my CPU underclocked to 2.0Ghz to keep it fairly cool (60C idle) and GPU underclocked also.
Playing games like BF3 is impossible thing to do for me, reaching same temperatures as mentioned before even while underclocked. Other people do not have the same problem, which leads me to improve my cooling in some acceptable way.

Simple Time Machine backup gets my CPU to around 90C in a while and that's about 30-40% CPU load at max we are talking.
 
If you're dealing with 60c without much load on the computer, its out of warranty and you've done this before, then perhaps the risk vs. reward is tilted in such a way for you to attempt it. I'd not go with the polishing as much as making sure the CPU is clean and use some high quality thermal compound
 
Well, I wanted more of a discussion about the articles I linked, about polished/smooth surface vs little coarsed surface and it's effects on cooling - heat transfer.
 
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