To say definitively what the bumps are made of, you would need to buy a Macbook off the shelf, disassemble it, desolder the chips, saw them in half, encase them in lucite, and run them through a scanning electron microscope equipped with an X-ray microanalysis system like this.
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited December 2008
We could break these stories if only we had an electron microscope laying around...
Well, unfortunately, back a few years ago when we overclocked the electric tea kettle (Bothered & Co, I believe), we got carried away and also overclocked our electron microscope as well. Buddy J thought it would make magnified images "faster." (Buddy J also lost an eye in the incident.) GE would not accept an RMA. Can you say S.O.L.?
On a more serious note, that was awesome investigative work by the Inquirer. I bet it will be LONG time before they get any review material directly from Nvidia. But then, they probably wouldn't want it. Hey, maybe Thermalright can develop a heatsink with a specially shaped base for these problem GPUs, 'intentionally' engineered to cool defective "bumps."
I'm sure the gradients we see in Thermalright bases, so commonly misconstrued as "machine marks" are really well-engineered thoughtfully designed reliefs for the bumps, built with a tolerance of .01 to account for the use of a quality TIM.
BuddyJ
Dept. of PropagandaOKC Icrontian
Comments
That's pretty hardcore.
On a more serious note, that was awesome investigative work by the Inquirer. I bet it will be LONG time before they get any review material directly from Nvidia. But then, they probably wouldn't want it. Hey, maybe Thermalright can develop a heatsink with a specially shaped base for these problem GPUs, 'intentionally' engineered to cool defective "bumps."