Below is an image of the heatsink removed off the chipset and GPU. To remove the HSF simply un-screw the 4 philips head screws and gently lift off the heat sink. A very small amount of force might be required.
As you can tell in the above image the thermal pads didn't seem to be making good contact and they were removed by simply pulling them off. No residue was left on the surfaces after removal. Below is how the GPU should look after the thermal pad has been removed.
Now that the Geforce 6600 GPU and the Intel 915 chipset are cleaned up you can install the thermal paste. I'm personally a big fan of Arctic Silver thermal pastes, but since I was out I used Shin-Etsu Thermal Paste. I normally use Shin-Etsu thermal pastes on applications where i don't want to worry about re-applying the paste every few months (like a notebook). My expierence has shown Shin-Etsu to be stable over time. Apply a generous ammount of compound/paste to the surfaces and place the heat sink on and remove it to make sure the surfaces touch.
After doing a test install we found that the video card was not making contact with the heat sink. If you look closely in the above photo you will notice the GPU didn't make full contact with the base of the HSF. More thermal paste was used and the heatsink was re-secured. Time to work on the processor!
Start off by removing the two screws that hold down the CPU fan and then un-screw the processor heat pipe. After removal we found that the contact here was fine. (See above image) The thermal compound on the processor is already Shin-Etsu and is hard to clean off. I used ArctiClean by Arctic Silver ($12) to remove all of the compound. Below is an image of the bottom of the heat pipe after using ArctiClean on it. This is by far the easiest way to clean a heat sink base! Apply a very thin coat of thermal compound here. I again used Shin-Etsu.
Time to run some temperature tests!
