[SWLUG] Thermal Compound and IPA

[Chris King]

On Sat, August 22, 2009 14:21, Emyr Derfel wrote:
> 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

Emyr

The Evo 120 isn't a bad little heatsink/fan combo, and deserves better
treatment than that !

If you've tried to wipe the gunk off with a kitchen towel, you'll need to
thoroughly clean the heatsink AND the heat-spreader on the top of the CPU.
You've probably laid down tiny fragements of cloth, and anything that was
on the towel at the time, like fabric conditioner etc.

Worse than that, you have applied the RS heatsink compound on top of an
unclean surface, which most likely *insulated* the processor from the
heatsink - and that's probably what caused the processor to overheat. You
don't get much leeway with AMD processors when that happens - it's
possible that 2-3 minutes was enough to damage the CPU permanently. I've
seen people scorch or even melt processor sockets in similar situations !

Isopropyl alcohol will do the job, but for a decent clean-up, I'd
recommend using Arctic Silver Articlean. It comes in two bottles - the
stuff in the first bottle dissolves old heatsink gunk so you can just wipe
it off, and the stuff in the second bottle cleans and prepares surfaces
for new thermal paste. Here's a random link from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arctic-Silver-ArctiClean-Material-Purifier/dp/B000BKP306

If you need a small amount of isopropyl alcohol, try your local chemists.

Whatever you use, wipe it off with a clean lint-free cloth, using the
towel again will only undo your good work !

Thermal paste - you can start some pretty vicious holy wars between
overclockers on the subject of thermal paste ! I used to use Arctic Silver
5 or Ceramique on high-end processors, but recently switched to Arctic
Cooling MX-2 on newer machines. MX-2 is easy to apply, works well and you
get a good-sized syringe of the stuff for under a fiver. They've now
replaced this with a new compound (imaginatively called MX-3) which is
supposed to be even better.

Disclaimer: I'm not into overclocking, I just want my machines to run
quieter and cooler than off-the-shelf hardware.

Chris

-- 
Chris King
http://www.csking.co.uk/