My experience with thermal pads for the CPU and GPU

I've read a lot of conflicting posts about thermal pads for the CPU and GPU on the 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 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 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.

 

I have the same experience as you do, I use 1.5mm for everything and it never let me down.