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How to check flatness of CPUs and coolers - INK and OPTICAL INTERFERENCE methods

sneekypeet

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Well, I already wrote this in the first post:


I also wrote about how it is important to be able to dial in the correct contact force and how some cooler mounting mechanisms are not very good for that.

Point being, you are more or less showing worst case scenario, which negates much of what we see in the images.
 
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Point being, you are more or less showing worst case scenario
This "worst case scenario" is similar to somebody mounting a cooler with a large flat base on the CPU. I do not think this is a rare scenario.

I have been using Arctic Freezer 34 cooler with LGA1700 CPUs (mounted with stock mounting mechanism in the socket) with small base and four direct contact heatpipes. Such cooler clears the worst raised parts of the heatpreader and has a much thinner layer of paste under it. This $45 cooler manages to cool 180W at acceptable temperatures (my specimen starts failing at 200 and fails at 210W).

Imagine what 6 heatpipe cooler with much larger contact area and properly banana shaped could do! It could cool 250W easily, or even more. And this could be still a pretty cheap cooler.

HEY INTEL, ARE YOU READING THIS? Make us a proper banana cooler for your banana CPUs! A nice 6 direct contact heatpipes shaped to fit your CPUs, covering the whole heatspreader surface. Thanks!

See the illustration:
heatspreader contact 3.png
I also drew a picture comparing The Intel Banana with The Bulge created by the mounting frame. For some people the frame can bring a noticeable improvement. But changing of the shape of the CPU is frightening for me. I wonder how many such cycles a CPU could survive.

heatspreader contact 2.png

EDIT: I see I used the yellow fruit name too many times in this post, sorry for that... :D

EDIT 2: I wonder if Intel could make a yellow version of their special cooler???
 
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Point being, you are more or less showing worst case scenario, which negates much of what we see in the images.
As if the pane of glass isn't bending when and where pressure is applied.

None of this is actually showing any scenario.

Contact frame is for preventing motherboard flex. Which causes the cooler mount to loosen or become uneven, in some cases the cpu pads separate from the pins.

I doubt the copper plate soldered to dies are bending before the board.

Sadly, we haven't any control and no measurements.
 
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Contact frame is for preventing motherboard flex.
This is a false information, the most important is the deformation of the CPU itself, It has been proven by the frame manufacturers, a lot of people posted their thermal paste patterns before and after installing the frame.
 
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From my experience the frames exert little to no force on the cpu once installed. That is proper as all retention devices should only serve to locate/stabilize the cpu in the socket. It's always seemed redundant to me why the factory brackets exerted so much pressure to begin with...the cpu cooler mounts already provide untold amounts of pressure.
 
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This is a false information, the most important is the deformation of the CPU itself, It has been proven by the frame manufacturers, a lot of people posted their thermal paste patterns before and after installing the frame.

PROVE this is false information

You make many claims. Have NO information.

I've called out all the reasons this testing isn't working well.

Ink isn't thermal pastes.
Glass pane flexes when pressed on.
Have no measurements for "I'm testing"
Test ink against what? Nothing.
How concave is the plate, by measurement?
How camel humped is the plate by measurement?

Board flex was an issue ALL THE WAY BACK TO SOCKET 775. For all of the reasons I've given you already.

Why does none of this matter to you?

I have tightly mounted many waterblocks on LGA platforms, and I've yet to see an IHS plate actually Bend and stay bent. Not certainly from conventional cooler mounting methods.

We are all looking at a man, that put ink on a cpu and slapped a glass pane to emphasize high and low spots on plates that happens to be a non issue for everyone else in the world that would never think to even consider the stamped plate of copper was not flat or flat enough to buy a contact frame.
 

sneekypeet

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The point is you are worrying over something that will cause only a few degrees of temperature fluctuation under a cooler with strong mounting hardware.

Back in the day (775 - 115x) we used to lap IHSs down to 2000+grit, and at the end of my experiences, I got 3 degrees improvement.

I mean by all means, carry on, but I can say with plenty of experience, there is a reason CPU cooler bases are not flat, but convex. To put pressure on the IHS and make better contact with variables like you show.
 
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I've yet to see an IHS plate actually Bend and stay bent.
You mean with your very own eyes? You should probably test it yourself.

With my own eyes I saw how flat is the IHS on a brand new CPU, on a CPU mounted in the socket with the stock mounting mechanism, I saw how bent is the CPU after spending few minutes in the socket and one whole day in the socket. I saw how is the IHS bending with the optional mounting frame. I also carefully photographed it in the same conditions with the same camera settings, and thus you can conclude that two times darker shade of ink means two times higher distance from the glass.

If for some reason this does not provide much value for you or has not met your expectations, I am sorry.

How I said, my testing is done. I originally did not want to test anything, just present some methods, but in the end I had to get the info I wanted myself...
 
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You mean with you very own eyes? You should probably test it youself.

With my own eyes I saw how flat is the IHS on a brand new CPU, on a CPU mounted in the socket with the stock mounting mechanism, I saw how bent is the CPU after spending few minutes in the socket and one whole day in the socket. I saw how is the IHS bending with the optional mounting frame. I also carefully photographed it in the same conditions with the same camera settings, and thus you can conclude that two times darker shade of ink means two times higher distance from the glass.

If for some reason this does not provide much value for you or has not met your expectations, I am sorry.

How I said, my testing is done. I originally did not want to test anything, just present some methods, but in the end I had to get the info I wanted myself...
Right, with my eyes.

Which is about as accurate as pushing on a plate of glass with your fingers and assume the mounting pressure is the same and equal... by feel of finger pressure? This is accurate testing to you?

The ink doesn't tell us distance.

Lapping a cpu is to use as little thermal paste compound as possible. That's the point of check flatness. To determine if something can be done about it.

The contact frame is to prevent the board from bending.

Fuck. I'll just grab the dial indicator. But not in this thread.
 
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Heck, you can do that with something simple as paint/primer. Been a tactic used for painting surfaces such as auto bodies forever. Machinist dye is great for layouts and visual reference.
 
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... practical method of making accurate flat surfaces ...
This thread is not about making flat surfaces, but TESTING FLATNESS of the surfaces in a way that provides information how far from flat the surface is.

In the optical interference method you count the stripes and get the result precisely with resolution of fractions of one micrometer.

With the ink method you can judge the flatness from the shade of the ink colour, you can therefore judge the shape of the object. And you can compare the difference from flat between two locations based on comparing the shade of the ink.

The Optical interference method is an objective measurement. You get numbers and a picture as a bonus.

The Ink method is an imaging method. You get only a picture.
 
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Despite the criticism, many people will read this and learn from it. I hadn't heard of this method before and I thought it was very cool regardless of its "scientific" value.

As a hobbyist, I am more likely to use ink than some fancy imaging device that I don't have access to or am willing to buy. So I appreciate you sharing this technique.
 
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I adjusted the interference picture to see more in the extremities, because I was thinking about making a height graph along the heatspreader diagonal, but then I got lazy and decided not to do it, so I am just posting the picture. You can see some additional stripes in the corness close together as the height falls off quickly.

View attachment 330794

Green light has a wavelength of around 550nm, and fringe to fringe means a depth difference of half a wavelength, so 275nm; so the picture suggests about 1 micrometer height difference. Since a lot of people have laser pointers this does not seem such a bad method.
 
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Hi,
Yeah it's like telling Noah about the flood actually
It's your time
If you aren't spending it shaping your cpu coolers cold plate to match the chip it's going nowhere positive since you have said you're not interested in flattening the chip or if needed cooler cold plate so they mate better.

And by the way No Intel is not listening :laugh:
 
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Green light has a wavelength of around 550nm, and fringe to fringe means a depth difference of half a wavelength, so 275nm; so the picture suggests about 1 micrometer height difference. Since a lot of people have laser pointers this does not seem such a bad method.
I am not sure how you counted that, how I wrote in the first post I counted up to 8 stripes in the indicated area, with your number that would mean 8x275 nm, that is 2.2 micrometers.

I am not sure how green light laser pointer would work, it is a coherent narrow beam of light. You need some sort of light that can uniformly light the whole area which you are examining. Perhaps some green LEDs can have narrow spectrum?

I will write again, that I see a little practical value in testing the flatness of the CPU with resolution of 0.3 micrometer, when the CPU then gets bent in the socket by HUNDREDS of micrometers.
 
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best way to sheck for flatness and lapping in general is to use a wetstone best one with 2 sides 1000/6000 grid and a flattening stone
this is what i use for my japanese chissels works as wel to make any surface as flat as it can get
and mark the cpu with a grid with a sharpy
 
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Perhaps some green LEDs can have narrow spectrum?
LEDs always have a narrow spectrum. The exception are white LEDs for illumination, which are made of a blue LED source and a wide spectrum yellow fluorescent layer.
 
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So....that was a read.

Let me offer some practical fitment techniques, as none of what we are seeing here is an actual measurement. My experience is with real tooling, which had to have 0.001" precision over a 60" set of dies...so it is less about hand lapping and more about real practical dimensions.


First off, Prussian blue is great. Bluing is much easier to obtain if you're looking for a laundry solution. Yes, you read that right. Laundry bluing. Mix it up thin, coat the metal surface, and let it dry. It's quick, but forms a pretty durable coating.

Now, take your lapping stone. Get one that is larger than the surface you want to lap. Do not use lapping paper or the like, because your inefficiency will screw this up. You are not good enough....because it'll take years of experience to do this by hand.

Now, lap the surface. The laundry bluing scrape off real quick...so only do a few swirls before checking. The lapping disc will become fouled, but a quick shot of water will clean it up.

Continue lapping until the bluing just barely vanishes, allowing the lapping stone's weight to keep it centered on the surface being lapped. This takes time because you aren't applying a huge force, but be patient. If you've thinned the bluing enough the resulting surface is going to be flatter than you'd image, and depending upon your lapping stone more than flat enough to meet requirements. I used this stone on tooling steel...your mileage may vary, but a silicon carbide may be better: MSC - Lapping Stone


Once the CPU is lapped, you need the same finish on your block. It may be non-ferrous....so do be warned that aluminum oxide stones here are a huge issue. Use the right tool. Coat the lapped surface in laundry bluing, cut with a little bit of liquid detergent. This sounds silly, but you'll need time. Install the CPU and the block, with the lapped CPU getting a skin coat of that bluing mixture. Give about 2-3 hours to dry, as the laundry detergent will become tacky over time. Once there's a crust on the edges of the interface, pop it loose. The lapped CPU shouldn't retain much if any of the bluing/detergent mixture but it will stick to the block.

Repeat the lapping technique from above, tilting the lapping block slightly to make sure any thick areas of the resulting bluing mix are lapped more aggressively. This will not give you a perfect interface (we had to lap on a flat table to get a true interface), but it should get your lapped surfaces aligned and correctly lapped enough to make much better contact than when you started.





Now, to the thermal loading shenanigans. Let me suggest that dies used in metal expanders don't consider thermal expansion. That is to say that the dies are installed with a cool machine, then during running they shear and stretch sheet metal inside what is basically a very large set of scissors. This generates a temperature very near boiling....which is a delta near where CPUs operate. If you install a die set there with a 0.001" spacing between blades it's still a 0.001" spacing under full loading, because you're looking at internal forces evening out the thermal load. Believe it or not, they're not huge. Because you're already taking up the slop of stresses with your block installation kit, it's unlikely that thermal cycling will ever apply enough stress to damage anything. I watched people install a blade and die set pressing the blades to dies (a functional 0.000" clearance), and the failure mode was material feed and not blade damage. Yes, you can have scissors/shears too close together to cut material.
 
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I tried to assess flatness of the Corsair XC7 waterblock with black ink, it did not work at all. With blue ink I got this, the base is bulging out stronly:

xc7a.jpgxc7b.jpg

The black ink failure was also due to the spike in the middle left there after machining the base. Such spike would either make a little indentation in the IHS or crack the chip if you used the block to cool the cpu chip directly. If the spike did not dig into the IHS, it would greatly increase the amount of paste and worsened cooling.

This bulging cooler base shape may work well with Intel CPUs bent in the stock socket mounting mechanism to the ba- I mean convex shape, but for my CPU which is also bulging out due to the mounting frame, this would not work well at all, so I had to get rid of the worst bulge. The job is not perfect, but it is much better than it was before for my use case.

xc7c.jpg
 
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Hi,
There is usually a part or it's the body inside the block that pushes the cold plate to create the bulge form.
Here a before and after on a sigV2 I had the same issue the bulge was a bit to much to make proper contact for my 9940x a while back.
But you can guess which part of the block is/ was forming the bulge hehe
SigV2 opened lapped and not lapped.JPG
 
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I think that the bulge on the XC7 block is there intentionally machined, how I mentioned this shape would probably work pretty well with Intel CPUs mounted the usual way.

Somebody should test flatness of an AM5 cpu new and mounted in the socket, if they get also deformed, I believe that due to the thick heatspreader they will not change shape much.
 
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Hi,
Yep ek magnitude does that milling on the cold plate and it's ribbed for her pleasure but not good for cpu's hehe :laugh:
Here's before and after lapping on a bit mostly just to get rid of the ribbed affect it also makes it way to tough to get the old thermal paste off
Want a cookie hehe

EK magnitude nickle face-copper polished.pngEK nickle face-back reflection.png
 
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