> Am I to understand this involves cutting off/removing the metal can > covering the CPU's chip?
Yes. Some people use a vise and extreme force. Others, including me, use heat to melt the solder. There is a low-temperature indium (?) solder used to solder the top of the die directly to a heavy copper heat-spreader plate that's formed into the lid. > How does that improve things? I can only assume that it's getting a bit of series thermal resistance out of there. And that eliminating that was helpful to get the desired thermal margins for the forced-to-be-smaller heat sinks used in the duals. I'm guessing that the Apple sinks are high-efficiency, so that the heat spreader plate was doing no good, only a bit of harm. Clearly not 100% necessary, as I believe the dual 5,1's went back to the regular lidded processors. It might just be that the later silicon was a bit lower in power draw, so that the could go back to normal and not worry about it. -- Jim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com