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Optically Flat

Jokester

Jokester

Jokester

Don
Joined
7 Aug 2003
Posts
44,670
Location
Aberdeenshire
Someone a while ago posted an image of a criss cross pattern that you could use to check the flatness of a CPU or HS to see if it was flat or not by looking for distortions in the straight lines. Anyone got the image to use or a link to where it was?

Jokester
 
lapped.jpg


Sorted.

Haven't tested it out yet, but it looks like it might have dropped my temps 5-10C.

Jokester
 
You look at the surface of the chip at an angle so it reflects what's on the screen. If the surface is flat the reflection will be a perfect image of what's on screen. If it's not flat the lines will appear curved.

Jokester
 
Robbie G said:
But what did you do with it?
Click to expand...

I lapped the top of it. Basically you take sand paper of increasingly fine grit and polish the top against a flat surface (I used a sheet of glass). Took about 10 mins of the rough stuff just to get the surface flat the top was so bad. The Conroe heatspreader is concave so it dips towards the centre. This means that in the middle you can't get decent contact and this is where you need it most as that's where the core is situated. Once it's flat it's just a case of using finer sandpapers to remove most of the surface roughness (the microscopic peaks and valleys) as this will aid heat transfer to the heatsink.

Currently appears to have dropped my load temps by a good 15-20C :eek: .

Jokester
 
I've upped the voltage to 1.55V (was about 1.5 before) and currently sitting at 3.6GHz.

Idle temps are 25C (was about 30 before if I remember correctly)
Load temps so far are about 45C though I was hitting about 60C before.

Going to be trying for 3.8GHz Prime stable.

Jokester
 
It's not the peaks and troughs in this case though. The IHS on a Conroe isn't even flat, let alone smooth. When I took my water block off it wasn't even making contact in the centre of the block the IHS was so warped.

Jokester
 
The IHS are soldered on so it's a bit trickier and generally not worth the risk unless you've got deep pockets.

Jokester
 
As far as I'm aware, there's two variants of the IHS, one that's concave and one that's not, if you use the credit card method for applying paste you'll notice that on the concave one that the heatsink doesn't actually touch the centre of the chip from the inprint.

When sanding you'll also notice that it takes about 5mins to wear the edges down before you reach the centre.

Jokester
 
ns400r said:
Nice example but what would a IHS that bad look like, polished, against the image?
Click to expand...
On a bad IHS, you'll get pretty bad curvation of the lines round the edge where it's raised.

Jokester

Edit:-

originalihs.JPG


That's what you're looking for
 
The Apogee is about 5C better than the Storm on otherwise identical setups for quad core processors (mainly down to the fact that the cores aren't in the centre of chip). The Storm is being kept for future.

Jokester

Edit: Swiftech are away to release a new block apparently specifically designed for quad cores.
 
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