This is not a repair question per se, but I thought I had the highest chance of an answer here. If it’s not in the correct place feel free to move this thread around.
I will go straight to my question first and explain the reason later.
How big is the gap between the EMI shield on the CPU side of the motherboard and the metal midframe/screen assembly?
My phone is not having issues with overheating, malfunctioning hardware and such. (My phone doesn’t have issues at all in fact :)) This is purely to improve the cooling of the various chips on the motherboard for 2 reasons:
-when I make a phone call, the phone heats up around the earpiece. It’s not enough to cause any harm, but it’s certainly annoying.
-I run BOINC which I will explain about at the very bottom of this post. To (potentially) improve the lifespan of the phone, but mostly because I am a geek like that, I like to reduce the temperature of my electronics. I repeat, my phone is not overheating, I just like to tinker with things.
My idea is to place some top quality thermal pad or thermal paste between the EMI shield and the metal support behind the screen to improve the dissipation of heat. I know some phones and tablets use the same method to improve cooling. I also know not to use a paste or pad that is corrosive, conductive, doesn’t dry out (too fast) and doesn’t build up charge over time.
I am open to all answers and feedback.
About BOINC: this piece of software is a middle-man for so-called Distributed Computing. The idea behind DC is to spread scientific calculations over a lot of smaller pc’s. This could improve the speed at which a project is finished, or save the scientists budget from having to hire very expensive supercomputers to complete the calculations. With BOINC normal civilians can “give” their computers or phones processing power to different scientific projects and help with research that way. The process will run in the background without effect on your normal day-to-day activities. For phones it will only run when connected to WIFI (so no extra cost for from 3G data), your phone is not too hot (to prevent overheating), and the battery is over 90% charged and still connected to a charger (so it doesn’t drain your battery). This basically means it will only run at night when your phone is charging for the next day. There are currently several projects that can run on Android phones, including research into asteroids, galaxies, maths, HIV treatment and cures for diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer etc. etc.
Running BOINC on all 4 cores inside the Fairphone gave me no problems with heat. After running a full night, the phone barely feels warmer than normal.
