Some general questions.

[xy007]

Ok so I have some general questions on some stuff I have been putting off on my GCP build.

1. How much heat paste do I need to put between the heat sink and the ICs? The gc seemed to have a lot on when I first took it apart.

2. How much air flow is needed over the original gamecube heat sink? I have two of these MC25100V2 Mini Fans from digikey. I am a little concerned because I cannot feel the air flow in the wind tunle thing I made. I was told it will most likely be fine since there is at least some air flow over the sink, but I don't know for sure.

3. Will this cause any problems if I shave off this much of the top of the heat sink? The ends of the ribs will no longer be as "pointy" and the heat will not be dispersed as well?

4. I need to trim the section I marked below in the pic and was wondering if I will still need to sand down the edges so that the 4 layers don't bridge? Is there any traces under the that specific spot marked or is it solid copper (each layer between GND)?

sorry for the tinypic images, imgur won't upload for me for some reason right now.

 

[Blargaman91]

You should definitely still sand the area after cutting the board. Most likely, all 4 layers in that area are ground so it wouldn't matter if they bridged, but it's far safer to sand and be neat.

 

[RageCreation]

1 - The thickness of thermal paste won't matter as long as you evenly cover the components.
2 - Not sure, but I would probably go with a thinner laptop fan.
3 - While you could probably get away with not sanding, like Blargaman91 said, it's far safer, and I don't see a reason to not sand.

 

[legofan623]

I went with 1.5mm thermal pads and they seem to work fine... Much cleaner than paste IMO.

 

[xy007]

Ok so today I tried out the fans again with the set up im going with and I think they should be fine hopefully. I ran the two fans off of a wall power supply and they seem to work better when together. The two fans have a rating of 3 CFM which I would think would combine to make around ~6 CFM. I believe the original gamecube fan is 12 CFM.

Is it possible the power supply was able to supply more power to the fans than the gamecube would?

Oh and I also ordered some thermal pads that should come in tomorrow that I will try out.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UYT ... ge_o00_s00

Edit: also trimmed that section on the mobo, there is a top and bottom layer of copper nothing else.