Hi there,

Do you have any experience with cooling systems in old Dell laptops? I've been using a D800 model as my primary machine for retro gaming for a few weeks now. The laptop is equipped with an Intel Pentium M 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB of DDR and a GeForce4 4200 Go graphics card.. Everything is running on Windows ME.

I'm planning to do a thorough cleaning of the hardware and replace the old thermal paste. There shouldn't be any problem with the processor, but I'm not sure what to do about the graphics card cooling. There are no pastes, only thermal pads, and I have a few questions regarding this issue. Maybe someone can help me.

1. Is it worth replacing the current thermal pads if they are still quite flexible (not hard or brittle)?

2. Is it necessary to use thermal pads with the same thickness as the factory ones? From what I can see, the GPU thermal pad is about 1 mm thick. I don't have a professional caliper, but I tried using a 1 mm thick Gelid thermal pad (which I used in my PlayStation 4 Pro) and it seems to fit roughly. I assume there's a 0.5 mm thick pad on the memory. I planned to use a Honeywell PTM7950 thermal pad for everything, but it's only 0.2 mm thick. Additionally, there's a special recess for the GPU in the cooling system, which probably has a thickness greater than 0.2 mm.

So the question arises: can I use the Honeywell pad, or would it be better to use Gelid GP-Extreme 1mm on the GPU and Gelid GP-Extreme 0.5mm on the VRAM?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.