I'm confused with which thermal compound I need. I see Arctic Silver has two products: Arctic Silver Ceramique Premium High-Density Thermal Compound, Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver Thermal Compound, and Arctic Alumina Thermal Compound. I assume they're different grades of quality. Which is the best brand/brand for my cpu?
IMHO the cheap plastic covering your CPU doesn't need expensive, exotic compounds to be cleaned.
I used q-tips and a micro-fibre cloth to remove most gunk from my CPU. The residual stickiness needed a solvent. I didn't have any rubbing alchohol on hand, so I used a tiny drop of clear cooking wine to clean the gunk off my CPU. It was only 20% alchohol I think. I'm guessing that 79% was water.
Then I used the white thermal compound that came with my Thermaltake Big Typhoon. Worked fine and my overclocked CPU temps are very low.
Heatsink aluminimum or copper surfaces are usually easy to clean - if they are polished well enough, even a thumbprint is clearly visible on them. IIRC, my CPU and GPU surface were like this.
Lapping could help with your temps. I haven't tried that. Some heatsinks have visible ridges on them.
I used q-tips and a micro-fibre cloth to remove most gunk from my CPU. The residual stickiness needed a solvent. I didn't have any rubbing alchohol on hand, so I used a tiny drop of clear cooking wine to clean the gunk off my CPU. It was only 20% alchohol I think. I'm guessing that 79% was water.
Then I used the white thermal compound that came with my Thermaltake Big Typhoon. Worked fine and my overclocked CPU temps are very low.
Heatsink aluminimum or copper surfaces are usually easy to clean - if they are polished well enough, even a thumbprint is clearly visible on them. IIRC, my CPU and GPU surface were like this.
Lapping could help with your temps. I haven't tried that. Some heatsinks have visible ridges on them.
tool_462
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- Jun 19, 2006
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Blouge apparently didn't read the whole Vegemite/toothpaste article as the author provided a graph of ACTUAL results and clearly showed that thermal paste outperforms those two by an extremely large margin.
A question is what CPU are you using and what CPU cooler? Are you overclocking? Generic paste is fine in all cases, it should just be known that when you want to drop as many degrees as you can, the higher end thermal compounds will provide better performance than generic goo.
A question is what CPU are you using and what CPU cooler? Are you overclocking? Generic paste is fine in all cases, it should just be known that when you want to drop as many degrees as you can, the higher end thermal compounds will provide better performance than generic goo.
You couldn't be more wrong:
http://www.dansdata.com/images/goop/nofibgraph2.gif
The graph shows that thermal paste, toothpaste, and vegemite perform about the same. Toothpaste actually appears best on this graph.
tool_462
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That isn't the performance bro. That is the thermal resistance. There is a review available that shows how using toothpaste and peanut butter actually were worse than using no paste at all. I would like to find it but I don't care that much, Da Clan will publish a thermal paste roundup and we will see how different the results can be.
Thermal resistance is an excellent measure of thermal compound performance:
"...the thermal resistance of the joint is directly proportional to the joint thickness and inversely proportional to the thermal conductivity of the medium making up the joint and to the size of the heat transfer area. Thermal resistance is minimized by making the joint as thin as possible, increasing joint thermal conductivity by eliminating interstitial air and making certain that both surfaces are in intimate contact."
"Thermal greases are notoriously "user unfriendly", but provide very low thermal resistance between reasonably flat surfaces."
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:CxwdBjDr1kQJ:www.electronics-cooling.com/Resources/EC_Articles/SEP96/sep96_01.htm+thermal+resistance+thermal+compound&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3&client=firefox-a
According to the page, low thermal resistance is correlated with high thermal conductivity and the elimination of interstitial air.
I posted links. Where is your link??
Please don't post accusations and misleading info with defenses like being too lazy or disinterested to back your own words up, or depending on non-existent future studies when there is plenty of existing data. Try to contribute something constructive.
Mondoman
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- Jun 22, 2006
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True, but you do want something that can remove oils/nonpolar substances. Anhydrous isopropyl alcohol does this, doesn't leave water behind when it dries, and is cheap ($1-2/bottle at supermarkets & pharmacies).
...
At least in the US, alcohol products labeled as "cooking" products (e.g. "cooking wine", "cooking sherry", etc) include a substantial amount of salt (so people don't buy them for drinking). Salt isn't a good thing for hs/CPU cleaning.
Yes, in the short run, many things will work similarly well. The main reason to use premium products is to get a high-quality carrier oil that won't dry out over time and lead to cooling failure. Of course, it doesn't hurt to get a few extra degrees of cooling as well.
"Vegemite test man" acknowledges this in another article: http://www.dansdata.com/ascer_ttv11.htm
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