Lapping my Alpha Pal?
 

Would I receive any type of performance increase by lapping my Alpha Pal 8045? I'm using AS3, just wondering if I could get a little bit more out of this block w/o switching over to water cooling.

I just put up a short article about lapping and polishing my Alpha 8045 earlier today.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~i6735189/cpu/alpha/Alpha.htm

You didn't happen to see what temps you got before and after lapping, did you? If you did, I'd like to hear them!

I have a question though. This black coating on the heatsink looks like it would be a thermal insulator. Does anybody know if removing the black coating would increase performance? You'd think that the coating would be an insulator, but I could be dead wrong.

Anybody?

The black coating on the aluminum is an anodized layer. It actually is supposed to help in heat transfer, so you wouldn't want to remove it. I am not totally sure on how it exactly works, you could look it up.

I lapped it before ever installing it, so I don't have any before and after temps.

I lapped and polished mine, and removed the spacer/shroud, and noticed a repeatable 1-1.5 degrees C. difference. This difference was mainly due to the removed shroud. I still saw a repeatable .5 degrees C. with only the lapped and polish 8045 however. Further airflow tweaks in the case,, dropped temps. another 2 degrees C.

I feel that the lapping, is only wothwhile if you have the time to spare (i do). Try the heatsink in the blow mode with the shroud removed. It seems to work on many case. I used to run in the exhaust mode with shroud, and while the Mobo temps decreased, I saw increased Core temps. This is most likely due to the wind tunnel I call a case (136 CFM) though, and not a reflection of the heatsink itself.