Microcool T441/T412 Thermal Pads and Chip Protectors Review

Cooling/Thermal Compounds by geoffrey @ 2007-09-12

Upgrading your cooling is not always the success you hoped for: thermal pads with bad adhesive, weird mounting mechanisms, or even worse a crushed processor core! All those things might sound as familiar for you as it is for me, luckily Microcool has the answer, I take a look at their Thermattach T411 & T412 thermal pads and core protective rubbers.

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Microcool core protective rubbers

Microcool core protective rubbers

The processor core is a further development of the first integrated circuits which saw daylight in the late 50's of the previous century. The idea was to miniaturize components so that it could be possible to build compact and more suitable devices. This hunt for smaller electronics brought us to this very own day where we have central processing units made out of millions and millions transistors, all together in just a few square mm. Even more amazing is that in most cases this high-end integrated circuit is being sold with its 'core' just bare naked, leaving the possibility to crack your brand new product in just a matter of seconds if your not being carefully. Industry leading manufacturers added a square metal plate over the processor core to prevent the users from damaging their CPU when installing heavy cooling equipment, though in many cases we still do find naked processing units and that's is likely not about to change in the near future. We at Madshrimps have already offered our readers a low cost DIY solution to prevent them from damaging their CPU's (or at least decrease the risk that anything could go wrong), though on the retail market we haven't seen anything yet the past few years that could be of any use, we're glad that finally someone noticed...

Madshrimps (c)


The small expanding rubber frames are an ideal solution to prevent the processor cores or chipsets, without their own protective packaging, from chipping or breaking during installation of the cooler. The protective rubbers were created in such a way that once subjected to the pressure of the cooler during fixing to the socket or the motherboard, they maintain the object in a perfectly flat position on the core surfaces. You therefore avoid the risk of unloading the weight onto the edges of the chip and causing it to break. The particular material used for the protective rubbers enables it to be cut or molded at will. Furthermore, the tape allows for convenient fixing in one simple application.

Specifications

Dimensions:

30(L)x30(W) mm

Material:

Expanded rubber

Volume reduction:

50%(compressed)


Product test

We held a local 7300 GT overclocking competition last few months here at [M], as a participant I saw many people trying to install the biggest heatsinks ever seen on a GPU core which is not greater then 1 square cm. Some were successful, other cracked their card in pieces, for me this was the excellent opportunity to test the protective rubbers Microcool has send over. Here is what is going to happen with my Zotac GeForce 7300GT:

Madshrimps (c)


The protective rubber installed around the GPU, it actually rises above the GPU though as mentioned above it is expandable, the base plate of our HR-03 will press it together to the same level of the GPU core.

Madshrimps (c)


Once installed, this is how my 7300GT looks like:

Madshrimps (c)


After doing such modifications, the system boot can be very stressing, did the card survive or not? Fortunately, mine did, it went through system boot-up without hassle and once in Windows I logged the GPU temperature with Rivatuner: 50°C load, a successful mod if you ask me. A few more installs confirmed that my mounting was decent and all that time my card never refused to boot because of broken parts. Once you decided to go back to the original cooler you won't have much problems removing the protective rubber, mine pulled off without further issues.

Conclusive Thoughts on Core Protective Rubbers

+ Protects CPU/GPU core
+ Easy install/uninstall

- Looses its bounding capability's over time
- Low availability

Thank you for reading, until next time!
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Comment from Sidney @ 2007/09/13
I need some thermal adhesive, with so many old CPU heatsinks around I could make a handful of micro heatsinks for RAMs and a few hot spots;

 

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