Cooling examined

Hesitance be gone! Cooling on the L400 demystified: CPU cooled via glue/paste contact (dried up in these shots) with metal tape via heatsink (helped by fan when installed). NB cooled via glued/taped on metal plate which scarcely has any contact with the steel wing.

The cpu seems to be covered in some kind of old glueish looking gunk. Would it possible or recommendable to clean it? If I put a heatsink on it I will have to throw away the whole stock cooling rig. Would a small heatsink get too hot and perhaps melt the keyboard close above? Could a slightly bigger heatsink sit comfortably on this small processor? (Jiggle risk…)

On the other hand, the current heatsink is pretty nifty, If I could find a good pad of some sort I could
just remove the gunk, remove the metal tape-thing attached to the heatsink (the grey patch) and reattach
the stock cooling. That is minus the cutout I will have to do to fit the heatsinks on the nb. Currently
the nb cooling pad/metal piece barely touches the metal wing so I’m not worried about temps there.

Ran system for 4 hours after reassembly, the fiddling with the heatsink caused no obvious problems.

Update: There’s not really any choice as far as the cpu and nb goes, you have to use the stock stuff. The lowest heatsink I’ve found is 5mm thick which would produce a noticable bulge in the keyboard. 4mm would work but at this minimal height any obscure heatsink would have such low heat dissipating abilities that it wouldn’t really do any difference for the cpu. (Stock is approx. 3mm thick)

Some rough measurements in mm (w – l – h.  Argh, no table function in the wp editor…)

CPU die 9 – 10,5 -
NB die 29 – 29 -
NB pad 25 – 25 – 1
GPU die 22,5 – 22,5 -

I’ve decided to keep the stock cooling solution but replace the old tape-paste stuff with atleast new, albeit cheap thermal tape.

Ordered:
1 Revoltec chipset cooling set (only bought it for the loose pieces of heat transfer-tape included) 85SEK/14$
1 Scythe Mini Kaze 40x40x10mm fan 80SEK/13$ – RETURNED (revoltec fan better for my use)
1 Dual CF to IDE adapter from www.webconnexxion.com (Addonics distributor in the EU) 19€, 36€ delivered