Using Arctic Silver 5 on PCH chip

It's the same model of 2011 15" MPB. Basically mine went kaput a year ago, and then my friend's went kaput a few weeks ago, so I baked the motherboard on mine before I attempted it on hers, and mine worked, but I'm concerned about the IO Controller chip and the Thunderbolt chip and them making contact with the flat metal heat sinks correctly. : / A few people in other places used copper sheets to fill in the gap, but I was wondering if there was another option.

The layer of paste applied at the factory was so thick that a dust bunny was sitting in between the plate and the chip just kinda stuck to the edge of the layer of thermal compound. On the first MBP the compound on these 2 chips was very dried out and crumbly, but on this one it is still a little bit "wet" in places.

First baking a board is one of the worst ways to repair a GPU, it's hit or miss at best. Next, it sounds like the first machine had defects. Each machine needs to be jointly fitted together with the new thermal paste and then see if you have contact.

You'll need either a special gapping paste or pads.

Arctic Silver is only suitable for heatsinks that touch smoothly. Altering the heatsink to change the gap is not wise! As your alteration can effect the alignment & pressure on the chip causing more problems.

- K5 Pro Viscous Thermal Paste

- Artic Thermal Pad

Thanks. Well my options were baking or trash can. And yes, there were tons of defective MB pros from that time - they overheat like crazy and the gpu detaches from the board - and they had a free repair/replacement program that ended the first of this year, and now Apple won't do any work at all on this model because it's "too old." So just doing what I can do. And both of them have the same large gap, the first one was just used for a lot of League of Legends. :D

Thanks Dan, I found a few more people who dealt with the same thing with this chip and used copper shims. I know I probably won't have to open it up again, but if I do... I read some horror stories about fusing the heat sink to the chip... Would thermal pads still be a better option than some sort of copper? Or would that only really be a problem with the gpu/cpu?

And yeah, that's what I was afraid of with the height adjustment. :( I'll just go back and put the tabs straight again.

Sarah, This 13" series only has the integrated GPU (HD Graphics 3000). It was the 15" series that had the troubles with the dedicated GPU most of it was the switching logic not the GPU chip its self.

I don't like the copper shim approach as you'll then need to apply thermal paste on both mating surfaces. In this case I would go with the K5 viscous paste as that is Apple used in this series on the PCH chip originally.

I should say the pad also works! it's just tricky to gage the correct thickness. You want it snug not tight! Many of the issues with melted pads is people replaced them with the wrong thickness as the chip heats up the pad will expand which drives it to push harder against the chip and sink which then causes it to heat up more! A viscous cycle till the pad melts.