To everyone that has done this mod, have any of you needed to upgrade cooling on the unit?
I was using thermal compound on mine, and one of mine shorted out and fried the gridseed. Apparently when you remove the pad, the screws compress down and potentially touch the unit.
Are you guys just leaving stock pads on there? I would like to get aftermarket pads, but to upgrade cooling on 50 of my seeds will be like $200 in thermal pads lol.
The thermal interface grease makes me paranoid now because of the 1 unit that fried.
If you remove the thermal pad on the back of the unit, you have to insulate the exposed contacts otherwise a short WILL occur. If you chose to use paste on the top of the chips instead of the thermal pad, then chances are you'll need to mill out part of the heatsink so that it makes full contact to all five gc3355 chips. There are 2 components (a 6-pin chip and the crystal) which are taller than the gc3355 chips. If you crank down the heatsink, you'll put a lot of pressure on those two components and likely break them or at least break the solder connection to the board. Thermal pads may not have level of heat transfer that the thermal paste does, but they're a much easier option.