While in the process of frying my 9700np tonight I thought up a way to build a shim should you need one for your FC-PGA video card or CPU. This was after frying my GPU, of course...

Tools that will be needed:

- Glue Gun
- Glue gun glue
- Lots of thermal interface material, greasegun grease, wheelbearing grease, or vaseline. Your pick.
- Item that needs a shim
-- Motherboard if this happens to be a CPU/northbridge.

If you can, get glue that stays soft for a longer period of time than the normal stuff... this will give you more work time and help keep mistakes from happening

How to build the shim:

Remove the heatsink from the item that you would like to put a shim around.

Apply a generous coating of thermal interface material/grease/vaseline to the heatsink that was attached to the item. This will keep the glue from sticking to it.

Apply glue around the GPU/CPU/etc core, or dabs in each corner. Make sure to use enough that it will press against the heatsink.

Quickly and carefully install the heatsink on top of the core before the glue has time to harden so it will flatten out easily. The faster you do this the better... it will keep from having to do it over multiple times anyways.

Give the glue 2-5 minutes to cool and harden, after which you may remove the heatsink and clean all excess TIM/grease/vaseline and test contact to be sure it is correct. If it is not you should be able to remove the glue easy enough to retry the procedure.


Now, a caution: The glue will have some amount of flex to it, so this is not perfect, but it is at least as good or better than the stock shims that do or do not come with many items and will help protect your hardware in the long run!