[CB_HK]

I’m curious to know if anyone has performed any maintenance on their heatsinks—pulling them off and replacing the aging thermal material underneath. With how old some of these systems are and how much they rely on heatsinks for cooling, I’m wondering if this is an issue that will need to be addressed at some point in the near future.

Does anyone have experience or thoughts on this?

[Jacques]

I pulled off the big block heatsink from a broken V8 the other day, it had a layer of squishy thermal tape. I believe the O2 cpu modules have the same, not sure about octane. These don't tend to dry out like thermal paste.

[GRudolf94]

SGI heatsinks, I've found, do not directly contact the underlying chip's heatspreader directly - they sit far above, and the difference is covered by the thermal pad. That is the case for a R10K, Xbow...and I think HEART too. As such, you'd have to either mill down the edges of the heatsink for it to sit flat against the chip, or buy new thermal pads of the proper thickness.