I opened up my HP HDX laptop yesterday to clean it (Warranty was over 2 years ago), and to apply new thermal paste.
My laptop has only 1 fan, 2 sets of fins connected to 2 copper pieces to conduct heat. Around the graphics card, there are these really soft black rubber pieces stuck on the heatsink, and it makes contact with things like the memory modules of the graphics card, and some other parts. There's also this thicker light blue colored rubber piece between the northbridge and the heatsink.
The CPU and GPU chips use thermal paste, but I don't know what these rubber pieces do. Are they used as a substitute for thermal paste? There's a fairly large gap between the heatsink contacts and the chips without the rubber pieces so I figure that normal thermal paste won't work as well. There's no thermal paste between the rubber pieces and the parts it makes contact with. Would it be better to apply thermal paste to that?
GPU: 9600M GT overclocked when I play games, way underclocked when I'm not
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 2.13 Ghz
GPU idle temp 49 C
CPU idle temp 39 C
Some people say these temps aren't high, but they are higher than when I bought the laptop (Also, currently in my area, humidex is around 35 - 42 C, around 27 - 30 C outside, 62% humidity. It's been so hot lately that some of my rubber bands melted into a sticky goop...)