It's getting hot and I tried recondition of the avalon, took 7 hours!
To my surprise, the whole hash module is one piece of PCB board, and although thermal compound are painted on the back of PCB board, only several spots of the PCB have a good contact with thermal compound on the heatsink, it means the majority of chips have no contact with the heatsink at all and most of the heat transfer job is done by those screws (23 of them)
![Shocked](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/shocked.gif)
Obviously avalon team do not have enough time to add thermal compound for each individual chip, and those chips actually are not that hot
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Favalon.mystisland.org%2Finside.jpg&t=665&c=kx_YQUl6xz-d_A)
Further examination of the PCB board shows, those exposed metal pads on the back of the chips are lower than the PCB board surface, they will never get a direct contact with the heatsink
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Favalon.mystisland.org%2Finside2.jpg&t=665&c=mmzDwVrDwOc24w)
I dropped different amount of MX4 thermal compund on different location of the PCB board to test the contact, without tightening the screw, they all spread out nicely. Applied thermal compund in this way, for all the metal pads, 240 of them...
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Favalon.mystisland.org%2Finside3.jpg&t=665&c=EB_PHCLjBoRL6Q)
Broke a tiny capacitor by accident, tried different method, no way to put it back on since the broken trace is too small to accept solder
![Cry](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/cry.gif)
(Luckily this does not affect hash rate yet)
Result is reduced 1 degree temp and lowered fan rpm, for a fixed fan rpm the effect should be 3 degree lower temp. I am more confident with the health of each chip now
By the way, using an external desktop fan to cool the bottom plate is extremly helpful, can lower the temp by another 2 degree