Copper Shims

Company: TweakMonster, OCZ, CPUFX
Product: TweakMonster Copper Shims
Street Price: Around $10 USD
Date Reviewed: March 13, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel

How Do They Fit?:

You can see below, the AMD shim fits very nicely, and there is plenty of extra space round the L1 bridges where you pencil in the traces. The P3 shim is on the right, and it is designed for FCPGA only (like you really need a shim for a Slot-1). This P3 shim is much larger and nicer than the CPUFX brand, and best of all, it works! You can see that over time (before I got this shim) my P3 has many chips on the corners, and I was getting a little worried about it, but now with the TweakMonster shim I'm not worried anymore about chipping the corners because the shim fits so well.

How Do They Compare?:

You can find the specifications for the CPU's in public datasheets available on the Intel & AMD web sites. The specifications are given in a minimum and maximum tolerance, however looking for an exact target number I took the average of the two guessing that is the number that production shoots for. Note that Intel has a narrower tolerance range, half that of AMD, but the average still comes out within two thousandths of an inch.

So now that we have a baseline to compare against, which we will say is .033" for Intel and .031" for AMD, we can measure the thickness of the copper shims to see how they compare. I took many measurements across the entire area of the shims to check for fluctuations in thickness (which we don't want).

Conclusions:

So how do we interpret these results? First I will tell you that all the shims except for the CPUFX Intel fit snugly and didn't slide around when used. The CPUFX Intel shim was so thin that it never made contact with the heatsink and would slide around freely (very bad). The TweakMonster shims, because they are CNC machined have a perfect thickness of .027", which is slightly thinner than our "average" CPU, yet thick enough to protect against chipping. The shim that came from OCZ which was also a TweakMonster shim was the exact same thickness too; this demonstrates the high quality that can be achieved with a CNC machine. The CPUFX AMD shim did vary in thickness up to .030" which is actually in the "red zone" tolerance wise, if you had an AMD CPU that was on the lower end of AMD's tolerance, then you could possibly fry your CPU because the heatsink couldn't make good contact with the core because the shim is too thick. The CPUFX Intel shim was way too thin to do anything but cause problems.

Bottom line, if you want something to be precisely cut then CNC is the way to go. I can say with confidence that the TweakMonster shims are excellent products and do exactly what they are supposed to. Beware of the CPUFX shims, you are taking a serious gamble if you want to try and use one of theirs on your CPU. 

OCZ is one of the many places that resell the TweakMonster shims, you can check out their website for more info, and also check out TweakMonster for more info.

Pro's:
  CNC Machined For Precise Cutting
  Fit Perfect
  Good Price

Con's:
  None

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