Here is the heatsink I will be using. It is 0.025" thick copper. It's about 50x thicker than the copper foil previously used.
I should have the thermal pad here by Friday I think. Stay tuned.
Silly question from a noob on this subjects:Update: as your well aware. The stock tablet doesn't have very good cooling.
The stock emi shield has a 0.5mm thermal pad on it. Well I thought it was 1mm. Now that I have a 2mm thermal pad. I'd like to say, you probably want a 1-1.5mm thick pad tops. 2mm has to be squished for the heatsink to fit.
Now for the new heatsink... Well really it's a heat spreader.
This copper is 0.025inches thick. More than enough to meet all the cooling needs.
What's strange is Google put some weird type of electrical glue over all the components. So basically I had to scrape off this yellow film from the die of the k1 chip. It was very uneven and gross looking. Ifixit has a better picture of the stuff. After cleaning it off, it looks like a gpu die. Yea
Thermal pad is on. You can't tell in this picture but the 2mm pad is definitely too thick. 2mm is like half the tablets entire thickness... Silly me.
Lastly but most important. The heatsink is on! Honestly after doing benchmarks I'm not convinced it's actually that much better... [emoji26] what might be an easier solution is actually getting a 1mm thermal pad and just swapping out the original pad for a thicker one that Google put on. The 0.5mm one barely made contact with the k1 chip at all. I'd imagine a new pad would do some goodness for cooling.
I used to get mid 70c on the package temp when on the OCN forum. No I barely reach 70c but I've hit it once.
Ah ha! Finally success! Only took about 30 times opening and closing get my tablet. But I now have a very well cooled k1 chip. The thermal paste arrived, removed the thermal pad and walla, great results.
This is the k1 chip with a copper shim. I used thermal paste and some glue to glue down the shim since I don't want it moving at all.
Next, I was finally able to cut some copper and keep it flat. Fortunately it fit perfect the very first time.
As you see, I placed the 2mm thermal pad on the back side of the k1 chip. This adds pressure to the heatsink and will use the back cover as a pressure plate to always provide a good contact with the chip.
As you can see, there's a slight indentation in the thermal pad. This is from the back of the cover where it's pressing on the pad and adding pressure to the heatsink, this ensures proper contact with the chip since there's nothing to screw down the heatsink with.
Overall I have about a 10c drop in temperatures for about 35 seconds. After that it will slowly raise in temperature as the copper heat plate becomes saturated with heat. However, I used to see 85c in some benchmarks at the stock tablet, now I don't see anything past 76c.
Ah ha! Finally success! Only took about 30 times opening and closing get my tablet. But I now have a very well cooled k1 chip. The thermal paste arrived, removed the thermal pad and walla, great results.
This is the k1 chip with a copper shim. I used thermal paste and some glue to glue down the shim since I don't want it moving at all.
Next, I was finally able to cut some copper and keep it flat. Fortunately it fit perfect the very first time.
As you see, I placed the 2mm thermal pad on the back side of the k1 chip. This adds pressure to the heatsink and will use the back cover as a pressure plate to always provide a good contact with the chip.
As you can see, there's a slight indentation in the thermal pad. This is from the back of the cover where it's pressing on the pad and adding pressure to the heatsink, this ensures proper contact with the chip since there's nothing to screw down the heatsink with.
Overall I have about a 10c drop in temperatures for about 35 seconds. After that it will slowly raise in temperature as the copper heat plate becomes saturated with heat. However, I used to see 85c in some benchmarks at the stock tablet, now I don't see anything past 76c.
My Nexus 9 (completely stock) went up to 93C yesterday.Not over clocking , completely stockWell the strange thing is the mod works great... However, it doesn't really help throttling... So something else has to be throttling down the chip...
Quite disappointing.
The actual chip will throttle at 72c ... However at 2.5ghz it's maxing around 68c on a stress test...
Another strange thing is when the gpu is overclocked to 950mhz the temps go through the roof on some stress tests. I've seen temps upto 87c when stressing the gpu and that's after the mod. Overclocking just 100mhz creates a huge temp difference for the gpu...
