m15x 980m and 920xm thermal pad thickness

[MatsueMaiku]

I've read a lot of conflicting posts about thermal pads for the CPU and GPU on the Alienware m15x. There are a lot of pictures out there detailing all of the different sized thermal pads that you need. In my experience, 1.5mm pads are perfect for everything on the Dell 980m and the 920xm. I was using 0.5mm pads at the time that I replaced both, so having the exact sizes was important. I think that I might have actually fried my 5850m in part due to not having thick enough thermal pads. I discovered that they had had not been making contact with the heatsink at all.
I tried following the guide on techinferno and noticed that my gpu was actually bending (a lot) and certain areas weren't even making contact at all. I tried different layering of thermal pads through trial and error, looking for imprints of vrms and such. 1.5mm on everything worked the best.
Some people are putting thermal pads on things that the manufacturers don't even put them on. I can't say what thicknesses are needed for these, but it will be more than 1.5mm.
Anyway, I hope that this helps someone. I was using Arctic brand 0.5 thermal pads and stacking them in my testing. I have 1.5mm pads on the way now.

[The Overseer]

I'm actually curious as well. May I ask where exactly you can find these types of pads? I looked online once and ordered some pads, but they weren't even remotely the right kind; I ended up with some similar to the ones you use for processors somehow...