Are they safe to place direct on the back of Laptop GPU/motherboard.? Here a photo of the area highlighted all ready place some on the ram chip's and that's fine I know il have to get non-conductive but still now sure if it be safe.
I don't see why that would hurt anything. Obviously you are trying to dissipate heat. Are you having overheating issues? Just curious.
It's a dell N5110. yes it's on the GPU as you can see in photo the cpu got a back plate that give great contact to CPU which is fine with temp but the GPU "nvidia GT 525M" only have the copper pipe plus two guide screw's so contact is not that great to transfer heat temps hit 90c playing games but this do drop down fast ending game. In most cases the laptop can mange the heat but when you start playing games where it use the nvidia chip power things start to get hot fast. It's a dual GPU with intel3000 GPU being the default chip with nvidia acting like back up when needed for better performance. Dell told me it's not a gaming laptop only a multimedia laptop for which i said why give it a dedicated graphics then. for which the reply was "only the dell XPS or alienware are for gaming i gave up after that. It's getting old now but still works great with 8GB/240GB ssd upgraded. poor design for cooling graphics chip's plus trying to make cooling mod for laptops is not easy. I use a cooling pad i made from 3x 80mm fans which do help.
- Use thermal paste rather than a pad when possible.
- Replace thermal pads with copper shim and thermal paste where possible.
- If the item you're trying to cool bolts down, use thermal paste instead of pads.
- More thermal paste does NOT mean cooler GPU or CPU.
- Some times replacing thermal pads with thinker better quality pads is great for cooling.
- Adding thermal pads to other chipsets can help keep things cool.
Every laptop is different and needs a different approach. can we see more pictures? that would help.
I certainly do not see dedicated graphics in that picture,
Yes that is just a basic intel set up with no add on chip. Sorry for the labels done these photo's for a friend learning laptop's. I have paid for a new back base as i destroyed the old one and end up looking a mess plus new cpu heat sink/fan but no real big improvements. What i do have on the GPU now is a heat spreader from a old ps3 cell processor but the real problem is crap contact with the gpu.
Adding a copper shim between the gpu chip and heatsinc would be the way to go.
I agree with Tim, if possible try a shim, they do different thicknesses, just follow the options I posted above.