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Thermal paste instead of pads on older thinkpads?

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First post, by Takino-42

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I have a couple of thinkpads that might have their pads dried up. On T43, I'm certain that GPU pads are dried up, since it can heat up to 90C easily somewhere in 10 minutes. On other hand, theres a Z60m that has it's gpu only heating up to 76C at worst (definitely alot usable than T43). Now, there was a video, where they put thermal paste instead of pads on T43's gpu, and I was wondering, is thermal paste good enough or doesn't reach up to the heatsink enough?

Reply 1 of 3, by shevalier

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Thermal paste efficiency drops dramatically at thicknesses greater than ~0.1 mm.
Only you can determine whether there's direct contact between the GPU and the heatsink in your laptop.

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Reply 2 of 3, by megatron-uk

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Which T43? I bought one recently and ended up replacing the heatsink/fan unit as the fan bearings were shot. IIRC, the interface to the CPU is taken up by a thermal pad as standard, but to the (in my case) ATI X300 GPU was paste already.

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Reply 3 of 3, by Takino-42

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megatron-uk wrote on 2025-12-28, 16:15:

Which T43? I bought one recently and ended up replacing the heatsink/fan unit as the fan bearings were shot. IIRC, the interface to the CPU is taken up by a thermal pad as standard, but to the (in my case) ATI X300 GPU was paste already.

Regular 14 inch one, with ATI gpu

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