The Soldering of the shim was my try to further improve the performance. The Shim sandwich i advise does not use any soldering.
Yes i was able to hit 80w peak and 62w sustained with my soldered shim and liquid metal, but thats not worth the risk.
The properly cleaned and lapped Coppershim does reduce the tempdelta further than just ptm on the og shim.
Think of it as the heat cycling causes tiny insulating bubbles to “boil off”.
My PTM arrived, I’m unfortunately in the middle of a large infrastructure change so will get to it after everything is done.
Well in the right directiin but not perfectly true.
The PTM transitions to nearly fluid when heated, the mounting pressure squeezes the Material out and reduces the thickness of the bondlayer. With every heatcycle the bondlayer reduces and gets slimmer tho reducing the thermal resistance. The phase transitioning stops after a certain time of heatcycles.
Thats why if removed it feels like hardened thermal paste.
PTM has next to no performance reduction over time and doesn’t need replacement like thermal paste or liquid metal.
Tp performance reduces alot when it hardenes and liquid metal has molecular transitions with the heatsink creating pitting and also hardening of LM.
Last weekend I got around to doing the PTM + soldered shim mod. I ordered a new heatsink and had some leftover Thermal Grizzly Phase Sheet from repasting my previous laptop.
It was my first time doing any kind of work with solder paste and a hot air rework station, so I was quite nervous. I lapped down one of the copper shims I ordered, and measured it to be .72 mm in thickness when I installed it. I removed the black sponge around the shim in the new heat sink and used the hot air station to remove the old solder with some cotton swabs once it was liquid again. I applied the solder paste to the new shim and stuck it onto the heatsink, and applied the heat until the solder paste went liquid. I kept the heat on some more time to give me a chance to press it down, and pressed it down with a wooden tool. I cleaned some of the extra that squeezed out of the bottom.
Then I opened up the laptop. I ended up bending one of the heat pipes on the original heatsink prying it off of the CPU die 
It was quite stuck, but using the spudger end of the screw driver, it eventually came off. I cleaned up the liquid metal, which thankfully didn’t seem to have run off much, it was just not evenly distributed across the die. Once everything was as clean, I made a stencil of the CPU out of paper, and used it to cut out a rectangle from the phasesheet. It went on the CPU, and I pressed it down using the spudger. When I removed the plastic, it unfortunately didn’t cleanly stick to the cpu, so I had to try again, and this time it seemed to do the trick. I put on the new heatsink and put the motherboard back in. I ended up catching the audio cable under the motherboard while screwing it back in, which I think damaged the connector, because the speakers don’t work anymore. Everything else about putting the laptop back together went smoothly.
After doing all that, I tested in Cinebench R23 and… didn’t get a spectacular boost in performance. I have the 7940HS with the dGPU. Before, making sure everything possible was closed except for Cinebench, I got 15003 in my best run. Now, my best run has been 15430. Not sure if I made a mistake when soldering the new shim on or applying the TPM or something else. I did install the new beta drivers FW released recently, which may be part of the cause.
As far as temperatures, the spread can still be as far as 7 degrees (celsius) between the hottest and coldest cores. The CPU (Tctl/Tdie) sensor has gotten as hot as 100.5. I may have just gotten unlucky with the silicon lottery. But my system in general seemed to be less affected by the performance degradation others have observed (CPU package power was in the 56W range)
In terms of fan noise, it is much improved when not doing anything that puts a lot of load on the CPU/GPU. They’re quiet during normal usage a lot more now. When gaming or compiling code, they still get noisy, but that’s understandable with the temperature readings and when usage reaches 100% across all cores.
The CPU package power has drawn 58W at maximum, so it’s within spec.
Overall, I think the mod is worth it to have the better cooling, even if not everyone will see a huge boost in performance. I’m not picky about fan noise, but not having them running all the time even when just web browsing or similar is worth it. I’ll report back if I run into any issues or if the performance improves as the PTM goes through thermal cycles. I’ll also test with the AMD drivers vs the Framework drivers to discard more variables.
Curious, did you undervolt the processor? I also have a 7940HS and unless I undervolt it the performance stays in the 15k score range. I can get -30 all core stable and it gets me closer to 17k.
I haven’t tried yet! Before doing the mod, I tried undervolting and it was really unstable and couldn’t get the undervolting to persist after shutdown. Do you just set the curve optimiser setting in x86 tuning utility and save it to a new preset? Or do you use something else to undervolt it?
Got my new RMA board ("supposedly without liquid metal) installed and BIOS upgraded to 3.05. Ran Cinebench R23 and I observed
Specs:
Thanks again for your insights!
As I had RMA before and my replacement motherboard started performing like my first one over time - I did replacement like you.
Copper shim 20x20x8 with “PTM sandwich”.
Removed heatsink:
Removed soldered piece from it
Polished it:
Polished 20x20x8 copper shim (1500, 2500, 7000 sandpapers):
Created “Sandwich” (CPU → PTM → Copper shim → PTM → Heatsink)
Results ( @~32C room temp as there air heat pipe right near my table):
Finally, after few weeks (look at the MAX column!):
On Cinebench R23 I got ~14280 score (maybe due to other processes / antivirus)…
Looks great the cinebenchscore is pretty dependend on background tasks. Hwinfo alone can decrease the points by 500.
But its a great tool for full load. To further unlock performance, the ppt fast/slow targets and the stapm limit have to be changed and opened, as the system always defaults to 54w after a few seconds.
Software tool for unlock is x86 universal tuning utility and if one want to change it for good you have to change the parametet on uefi level with smokeless_umaf (expert level 
)
Finally got round to replacing the LM with the provided PTM.
Things to note:
Re performance. I tested with a full-core s-tui, then checked per-core temps using amdgpu-top.
Before:
It did not matter what power profile I chose it would always saturate at 28W power usage and ~3.475Ghz with the fan at max speed. Core temps 77C to 100C
After:
Powersave profile:
32W, ~3.775Ghz, Core temps 73C - 82C, fan was running audible, but not very loud.
Balanced & Performance profile:
50W, ~4.35Ghz, Core temps 90C - 99C, fan was pretty much at max
This is a VERY noticeable difference, I’m glad I did it. I’m not glad at how annoyingly frustrating LM was to work with.
Sorry for the delay! I use Linux with RyzenADJ. I think XTU uses it as well? I think there was a setting to make it reapply after a shutdown, but you had to have the program auto-start with the computer.
I used CoreCycler on my desktop when checking CO, it stress tests individual cores/threads to check stability. I’ve not done anything similar for my laptop though.
I applied the PTM from FW for my FW16.
Took a while to do, checking that no metal was left behind.
It seems to have worked. The amdgpu_top reports more even temperatures now.
Note: the FW16 mainboard does not boot standalone. It needs the fans connected.
Just finished applying PTM that framework sent me. I Think I did a job removing the liquid metal but it was my first time handling PTM and I screwed up applying it.
You guys think I’ll be fine, will it spread out to the corners?
Sent this via framework 16 didn’t benchmark or stress-test yet
It will probably be fine. I read somewhere that it will spread out a bit due to the heat sink pressure on it.
When my kit arrived, the customs form said it was worth $ 0.20
Why don’t they include 2 pieces, just in case?
If you have some small bits that broke off, just try to stick them back down where it is currently lacking. Use the small piece of plastic that was on the PTM to position the last bits.
That looks absolutely fine. That stuff will get liquid when warm and the pressure from the cooler also helps. Mine looked way worse after applying it (on the Framework 13 though), and the temps are still very good.
Its fine, nearly 70% of the material squeezes out the edges when its heated and squeezed due to mounting pressure.
Okay thanks,
I ran cinebench and got a score of 16023, up from 14470. Seems to be good
BTW for anyone that still hasn’t replaced the liquid metal supposedly you can put the ptm pad in the fridge to cool it down so it’s easier to work with according to LTT (wish I knew that)
You can and it does help but not for long, with the high thermal conductivity it doesn’t take long for the pad to heat up again just from handling it
oh wow, that’s insane result! is this a 7940HS or 7840HS?
Its the 7940HS
