Flagship Tuneups

Cooling, perfected. Available nowhere else.

The definitive thermal upgrade

Flagship Tuneups are a precision thermal enhancement for those who demand the highest possible performance from their computer. Unlike conventional cooling upgrades, Flagship tuneups don't increase mass or noise, decrease performance, or change how your device looks or handles. Instead, we perfect what's already there.

As a processor operates, it generates waste heat which goes into a heatsink, which dissipates it into the air. The interface between the processor and heatsink is never microscopically flat. These imperfections must be filled by thermal paste, which is far less thermally conductive than metal and impedes optimal heat transfer.

Flagship Tuneups eliminate that bottleneck. The heatsink contact surface (where the heatsink touches the processor) is meticulously lapped to achieve near-perfect flatness, while polishing it to a mirror-like finish. The result is the near-ideal surface contact, superior heat transfer, and temperature reductions that often exceed 20 C (under identical testing conditions*, see end of section).

Because the process refines instead of replaces, there are no downsides:

Unchanged weight, fit, appearance, and physical handling characteristics
No compatibility concerns, added points of failure, or additional maintenance

What was once reserved for a handful of dedicated (probably insane) enthusiasts is now offered as a widely-accessible refinement for any device. Flagship Tuneups are offered exclusively by us and are tailored specifically to your device, ensuring each device achieves results that no conventional upgrade can match.

If you're interested, please contact us by email, berkeley@the-it-club.org!

Lightning fast. Zero compromises.

We are the first to ever commercially offer this service. Instead of a time-consuming, incredibly expensive process done by only a few (probably insane) computer enthusiasts on their own devices, we've made it so fast and affordable that it can be done by a single (definitely insane) person, our founder, in under two hours.

Traditional heatsink lapping is slow, inconsistent, and highly dependent on individual technique. Results vary widely, and achieving favorable outcomes requires hours or days of trial, measurement, and correction.

Through extensive refinement, we've developed a controlled, highly repeatable procedure that minimizes consumed materials and variance without reducing precision or quality. Tooling, surface progression, inspection, and finish criteria have all been standardized to ensure each heatsink reaches true flatness efficiently and safely, all without breaking the bank.

These improvements allow Flagship Tuneups to be completed in under two hours with results that match or exceed the best enthusiast attempts, all for $200 or less.

It's only for everything.

Because of their purely mechanical nature, Flagship Tuneups are hardware- and software-agnostic. It works on nearly any device, and its effects will remain no matter how many OS reinstalls or CMOS resets you do. Laptops, desktops, consoles, servers, workstations--we can do it all.

S-tier service, S-tier tools

We only use the best possible materials in Flagship Tuneups.

10,000-grit sandpaper to bring the heatsink contact plate to a shiny mirror finish
Custom lapping surfaces machined down to an exceptional 0.0001" flatness
PTM7950 to provide outstanding thermal performance for the entire life of the device
12.8 W/mK thermal pads for improved cooling of surrounding components
Burn-in testing to measure performance gains
...and all the other stuff we do in a Standard Tuneup!

...a sneak peek?

Here's a look into the secret sauce behind our star product!

The device in question is a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 10, a notoriously hot-running model due to Lenovo shoving a 28W P-class CPU into a chassis designed to handle a 15W U-class chip. (Yes, all of those are different links.) One of these laptops landed in our lap. Initially, it was in a sorry state, only reaching 12W under load at 98 C. Time to fix that!

Popping off the chassis and removing the heatsink reveals this mess of hardened dry thermal paste. OEMs rarely get thermal paste right...

The included thermal pads don't have the best thermal conductivity, so I measure the thickness of each thermal pad with calipers and apply the appropriate replacements. This one goes on some of the inductors, and will be replaced by a 0.5mm thermal pad.

Putting a piece of glass on the back of the heatsink helps maintain even pressure distribution and protects the back of the heatsink from the repeated rubbing motion.

I also remove the fans and wrap the finned area of the heatsink with masking tape to protect this difficult-to-clean area from the copper dust generated durign the process.

Using a custom block of glass (left), I start off with 80-grit sandpaper to even out any flatness variations in the heatsink. The first parts to show scratches are the edges of the contact area (right), showing a highly non-ideal flatness distribution. Normally you want the contact area to be flat or convex, so the hot-running center of the processor receives better thermal contact.

After a bit of sanding, the contact area is mostly leveled. (Note: The area between the ⌜ ⌟ reticle is where the CPU makes contact, so that's the only place we care about.) There's still a spot in the reticle that hasn't been leveled yet, but that'll get flattened as we transition to finer grits. Also, this plate is pretty thin and I don't want to sand too much of it away in order to maintain structural integrity and reduce mechanical creep. I took some more pictures every several grits so you can see the transformation.

120 grit...

240 grit...

400 grit...

800 grit...

2000 grit...

5000 grit...

And we've finally arrived a the end result! 10,000 grit, enough for an alluring reflective finish.

With practice and time, I've been able to refine my hand-sanding procedure to improve the heatsink contact pressure distribution. While I forgot to take a picture of this laptop's pressure-paper test, here's a before-and-after of a Vega 56 heatsink.

After finishing the lapping process, I thoroughly clean the heatsink of metal dust under running water with a brush, dry it, reattach the fans, and reassemble the laptop.

I assign each computer I work on a sequential number, tracking the number of Tuneups I've done since I started doing 'em for Berkeley students as a freshman. This one's #338. The "+" shows that this is a Flagship Tuneup. That sticker in the bottom-right is our old logo. Still have a stock of those to go through.

To stress-test the CPU, we use prime95 on all cores with Small FFTs, maximizing the heat output of the CPU. The results are promising, but honestly kinda routine at this point. (Note: Initial test results showed 12W at 98C.) The screenshots below show boost and sustained performance after the procedure.

The initial turbo period at the start of the stress test results in a package power of 40-48W, which the laptop is able to hold for ~20 seconds without throttling.
Steady-state results are much improved. The laptop is able to indefinitely hold 19-20W at a ~67 C CPU temperature. The laptop is also much quieter and no longer has fans screaming.

This is a 31-degree-C improvement in worst-case CPU temperatures, all while improving performance (package power) and noise! I think the result speaks for itself.

*Testing conditions: Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 10, Core i7-1270P, connected to official Lenovo 65W USB-C charger. Windows 11 IoT LTSC 24H2 with all drivers installed, on the "Best Performance" power plan. Set on a flat surface with no environmental forced convection, with a measured ambient temperature of 21 C (70 F). Stress-tested with Prime95 (small FFTs, all cores) and monitored with HWinfo. Temperature measured at steady-state, when the laptop has stopped its initial turbo behavior and is operating at its steady-state load clock frequency and package power of ~20W. Before: 12W @ 98 C. After: 19W @ 67 C.Additional info: Processor performance comes at the cost of temperature and noise (and other tradeoffs). Based on how your system's firmware is configured, a Flagship Tuneup will improve at least one of these three categories. For example, the Thinkpad featured here shows an improvement to performance, temperature, and noise. However, if your processor's power limit is initially constrained by its firmware and not thermals, your performance will remain largely unchanged, but temperature and noise will drop significantly. On the flip side, if your processor has an unrestricted power limit, a Flagship Tuneup will improve performance, but it won't help load temperatures or noise levels.

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