[SWLUG] Thermal Compound and IPA

[Emyr Derfel]

Hi all

Last night I transplanted by PC into an Antec P180 case with a rather nice Akasa Evo-120 heatsink. The CPU is an Athlon X2 4200+ (socket AM2, 2.2GHz, 89W TDP). The mobo is an Asus M2N-E.

I wiped off the old thermal gunk with a kitche towel and tried to apply some of the RS heat sink compound my colleague had given me. This gunk seemed very sticky, and a bit too solid. I went with it anyway, and the PC ran for 3 or 4 minutes, long enough to get lm_sensors and gnome-sensors-applet installed. I'd set the Q-fan feature in the BIOS to optimal so I could hear the CPU fan changing speed.

After another minute of so, one core got hotter very fast, and I killed the power at 85 degrees. After waiting for it to cool a bit, I tried booting into WinXP to see if lm_sensors was misreading. The machine shut itself off before my monitoring app loaded.

My plan is to clean all the old gunk off and try again with new thermal grease. The only sellers of IsoPropyl Alcohol I could find were Maplin at £8 a can, and the cheapest gunk they had was about £2. I know from ebuyer that I should be able to get a small sachet of gunk for under a quid, but I don't know of any other sources for the IPA.

Emyr