So I just lapped my Q6600 and Arctic Freerzer 7 pro..

So I've been reading up on CPU and HS lapping and I decided to give it a go. I used 2 guides to assist me along the way:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/guides/lapping/ as a heatsink guide and http://forums.legitreviews.com/about10788.html as a CPU guide.

I went out and bought some 400, 800, 1000, and 2000 grit sandpaper which was surprisingly hard to find. I thought for sure Wal-Mart, Menards, or Home Depot would have them, but after I struck out at those places I wandered into a Murray's Auto Parts and got what I needed.

So, onto the good stuff. As you can see the Q6600 is overclocked to 3.4ghz, It usually runs at 3.6ghz but after seeing these temps I wanna step it down till the Arctic Silver 5 settles. I took some screens of my computers temps from Coretemp as a reference. Prime95 is used to set load.
Idle Before: 57, 58, 54, 54


Load Before: 81, 81, 75, 77


So needless to say I was getting a little worried. After a few hours of carefully lapping up to 2000 grit I have a shiny Q6600 and a very shiny Arctic Freezer 7 pro. As it turns out, the Q6600 was pretty Convex (budging in the middle), and the Freezer 7 was somewhat concave (bubbled inward) in the middle. Sorry I dont have a digital camera to document the work. I reapplied some Arctic Silver 5 and ran Coretemp to see the immediate results:

Idle right after: 59, 59, 54, 55


Load right after: 72, 71, 66, 67


As you can see my idle temps stayed that same if not increased 1 degree. More importantly, my load temps dropped 10 degrees immediately! Now the Arctic Silver 5 is still fresh and needs to be burned in to get maximum gains, so I will be updating this thread at the 3 day, 1 week, and 2 week mark with a graph to show my results.

If anyone was wondering if lapping is worth it, all I have to say is apparently yes!

Thats amazing... i wouldnt have though there would be that much difference... I just went from a Freezer to a Thermalright Ultra and droped ~8c under load... but a 10c drop with only lapping that impressive

Well done man, will be interested to see the results after a few days/week or so

Thats when you use sand paper and make your processor and CPU cooler really really really smooth on the contact surfaces so the heat transfers better.

how is lillia these days, lol

nice!!!

next time post pictures

Well after reading this post at 6 this morning, i picked up some sandpaper at work today and lapped my Arctic Freezer 7 Pro, i did not touch the cpu, that sounds too scary, especially since my cpu is only a week old. Well i spent about an hour on this project. And to the guy that had trouble with the plastic clips, i very carefully took my clips of that "x" bracket and it worked just fine on the table. Well here are my screenshots with the results.
This is idle before lapping


This is under stress before lapping



This is idle after lapping



This is stress after lapping



Notice there was a nice change after only lapping the heatsink. There was a 4c drop for cpu temp and a couple c drop on each core. I am very happy with the results. I used the guid listed at the beginning of this thread to do it if anyone cares.

Just lapped my 6400+BE and my Rosewill 92 cooler. Thanks for the info by the way. I have a 9850 on the way and hope it works well for it. Wal-mart in South Beloit IL had all the sand paper up to 2000 grit, It was 9:00pm when I read your post, all auto shops were closed so went to wally world, cost me $14.00 Idle temps are only a couple of degrees lower, have not tried to stress it yet. I ll let you guys know.

Ok so I finally got all this straightened out. Reseated, reapplied AS5. So Far, so good.

Idle:


Load:

The soap made it so much easier! In fact, right after i added soap onto the heatsink was when I got the smoothest and even laps.

I dunno. I still don't think lapping will do impressive difference, at least for me. If your not going to have cool air, and great airflow, the lapping or quality of thermal grease isn't going to do anything. If you think about it, the coolant your using is air. If you don't have it, or can not flow that air through the case effectively, then your going to have hot readings regardless of what you do.

I know I'm not OC'ing my Q6600 to 3ghz, but 2.850, which is only 150mhz difference. I'm getting lower idle temps because of perhaps 3 reasons.

1.) Speed Step - reducing the voltage and speed when not in use. (2.850 ghz is reduced to 1.896 ghz when not under load)
2.) HS - I use a tuniq which can displace more heat then stock or smaller type HS
3.) Airflow - I know my airflow is great simply because of the amount of dust I get in my PC case. . o O (one con against good/great airflow)

Now my CPU/HS are non-lapped. I've made a thread not long ago:

My Q6600 upgrade

If your read through my thread, you will see that other said their setup was running cooler, which was linked to ambient temps and airflow.

So I hope this helps you understand perhaps things that are being over looked in trying to reduce heat, but get that extra kick when needed, which I am referring to speedstep.

wow, very nice. I might try it on the stock heatsink but not my AC Freezer, just in case I mess stuff up. And if it works, I'll do it on the Freezer.

OK! Day 3 update time!

Day 3 Idle:


Day 3 Load:


As you can see, temps have gone down! Here is a pretty crappy chart I made from my inital temps until todays temps:


Will post result of 1week on Thursday or Friday

I also lapped my q6600 and freezer pro 7 this week. Before was running @3.4ghz idle ~42 load peaked @70, now idles ~38 and loaded peaks @59. 11C under load was way more than I expected. The finest paper I used was only 600 grit, but I wet sanded the whole time. Now I'm running @3.6 with a peak load temp ~69

um... Steven where do you live? cuz im in Canada (summertime avg 25c outside), not sure of my ambient temp but its more than comfortable (today anyway lol), no AC, one house fan and my 3GHz G0 Q6600 is 36c idle and 44c under load. with OCZ Vendetta 2 cpu cooler and Antec 900 case (the 4 included fans (at medium), plus one that i added. No lapping done at all. voltage according to cpu-z is 1.35v but bios shows lower... how in the heck did you have 59c idle and up to 80c under load?! Do you live in Brazil or something?

um... Steven where do you live? cuz im in Canada (summertime avg 25c outside), not sure of my ambient temp but its more than comfortable (today anyway lol), no AC, one house fan and my 3GHz G0 Q6600 is 36c idle and 44c under load. with OCZ Vendetta 2 cpu cooler and Antec 900 case (the 4 included fans (at medium), plus one that i added. No lapping done at all. voltage according to cpu-z is 1.35v but bios shows lower... how in the heck did you have 59c idle and up to 80c under load?! Do you live in Brazil or something?