The first step to ensuring a quality job is to be sure your mounting surfaces are clean and prepared to make the most of thermal conductivity.

A note about lapping:

Although in my experience RAMsinks tend to work just as good with or without lapping, some people just have to have their mounting surfaces 100% flat and shiney. Lapping the RAM chip itself is not necessary, as we want a somewhat textured surface for the adhesive to stick to.

Take a cotton swab dipped in alcohol, or equivilent cleaning solution, and clean both the RAMsink mounting surface and the top of the RAM chip surface well.

Clean the surfaces well

Time to mix the adhesive.

The Radeon 9700 PRO video card we are doing today has 128MB of RAM onboard.....4 RAM chips on the front side of the card and 4 on the back side. Mix the adhesive in a 1:1 ratio, only mixing enough to attach about 4 RAMsinks at a time so the adhesive doesn't start to 'set-up' on you before you are finished attaching everything. You will also need to let each side 'set-up' before flipping the card over, so only do one side at a time. The RAMsinks packaging makes an excellent surface for mixing the adhesive.

A quick note about mixng thermal adhesive and thermal compound:

Many people like to use thermal compound to weaken the bond between the RAM chip and RAMsinks so that they might remove the RAMsinks at a later time. I asked Arctic Silver about this method, and they told me that they do NOT recommend doing this as a general rule. On the flip side however, you must also consider the possibility that your card may need warrantying sometime in the future, and so weakening the adhesive mixture slightly will allow them to be easily removed in that case. To do this, after mixing the 2 parts of the adhesive, immediately mix in the thermal compound in a 1:1 ratio, then install the RAMsinks.

The RAMsink package works great for mixing