Slightly bent CPU heatsink when switching out Liquid Metal to PTM - How bad is it?

Framework Laptop 16
1

When i switched out Liquid Metal to PTM and pried up the heatsink i slightly bent my heatsink (See pics). I could install everything back to normal and i do get a nice bump from 12000 (liquid metal) to 14400 Points (PTM) in Cinebench R23 and from about 33W to 55W Initially - however the 55W dropped consistently to about 47W at the end of the test so im a bit worried that this was caused by the heatsink issue struggling to remove the heat.

Am I beeing paranoid or could this be the case ?
Also any Cinebench Results for Multicore without GPU for comparison would be highly appreciated if you got the PTM. I read in the other thread people are able to achieve about 16k points.

PXL_20250418_152157082.MP
PXL_20250418_152157082.MP1920Ă—2550 198 KB

PXL_20250418_152211433.MP
PXL_20250418_152211433.MP1920Ă—2550 163 KB

2

I slightly bent my own when I did the LTT PTM7950 install on my own machine last September. Like you, I was worried, but so far it’s been fine.

1 Like
3

It’s fine, I bent the right pipes a bit while disassembling the first time because I missed the 2 screws that aren’t immediately obvious, bent them back, no impact on cooling performance.

4

There are FW provided instructions on how to remove the heat sink now. It says where to pry the heat sink up without damaging it and where the 5 screws are.
It’s the LM → PTM one in the “guides” section.