What's the consensus here on copper shims?

[thesloc]

Basically a copper shim is supposed to prevent the laptop from over-heating and frying your GPU (or CPU)

But I keep getting different answers, some say this heatsink traps more heat than it should, others, that it prevents overheating all-together.

I have never installed one myself and I've worked on hundreds of laptops by now, usually, a dab of artic silver and a well-seated heatsink does the job for most overheating purposes.

[yyonline]

Re: What's the consensus here on copper shims?

I haven't installed one either. In my mind, if it needs a copper shim, there's some serious issues with the cooling design and it's only delaying the inevitable. I keep a good amount of different thicknesses of thermal pads on hand for replacing them in laptops. Thermal paste won't work in these scenarios, as there's too big of a gap to bridge with thermal paste. As long as you use the correct thickness of pad and keep it under pressure, they do a decent job of transferring heat.

My personal laptop is Dell Latitude D620 with the failure-prone Nvidia chip. (Zero issues to date...knock on wood.) This seems to be a common choice for adding copper shims for the Nvidia chip. However, I figure it probably won't do much. The Nvidia chip and CPU share a heat pipe and heat sink. The fan doesn't kick in until either the CPU or GPU reaches about 75C. Once it does kick it, it cools the GPU and CPU down to the high 40s in less than a minute. So, the thermal pad is transferring the heat just fine. With the factory fan programming, I'm not sure copper will be much help. If anything, it could be the opposite, delaying the fan from coming on and allowing the chip to stay hotter for longer.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: What's the consensus here on copper shims?

If it didn't come with one then you don't need one.
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[severach]

Re: What's the consensus here on copper shims?

All the HP laptops in the class action said that. You're essentially saying that if the heat design is substandard then toss it out. I quite agree but I can't get others to let loose of their laptops.