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Arctic Silver

T

TheSpoon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2004
Messages
431
I'm planning to get some Arctic Silver 5 soon to hopefully lower the temp of my A64 3400. Will I have to get a new heatsink too? This page (http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm) says this:

If your heatsink has a thermal 'pad' mounted on it, this pad must be removed before using Arctic Silver thermal compound. Thermal pads are made with paraffin wax that melts once it gets hot. When it melts, it will fill in the microscopic valleys in the heatsink with wax. To minimize the permanent contamination of the mounting surface with wax, the thermal pad should be removed before it is used and melted.
Click to expand...

If that's true, which HSF combo should I get? I'd like it to be as quiet as the stock HSF (and at least as good at cooling).


Thanks
 
TheSpoon said:
I'm planning to get some Arctic Silver 5 soon to hopefully lower the temp of my A64 3400. Will I have to get a new heatsink too? This page (http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm) says this:



If that's true, which HSF combo should I get? I'd like it to be as quiet as the stock HSF (and at least as good at cooling).


Thanks
Click to expand...

Yeah the wax melts and it's a bitch to cleanup sometimes...so scrape it off with a credtit card first then clean the HS as directed at the arctic silver website.

MD
 
Well the AS website says this:

Once you have applied a thermal grease or melted a thermal pad onto a heatsink, it is impossible to remove all of the grease or pad from the microscopic valleys in the heatsink using standard cleaning chemicals and paper or fabric towels. Any subsequent thermal material will be applied over the remnants of the original material.
Click to expand...

So how much of a problem is this? Is it worth getting a new heatsink? I think part of the reason my temp is fairly high is because after attaching the heatsink, I took it off and then put it back on. The reason I did that is because my newly built comp wouldn't start up (it ended up being a PSU issue), so I was trying to make sure everything was sitting properly. At the time that I took off the heatsink, the computer had never been turned on yet.
 
Not everything written on AS5's webside comes on stone tablets from a mountain. Yes, little microscopic valleys are filled by "old" thermal materials. But - as long as the valleys are filled with something with a reasonable heat conduction (like "lesser" thermal grease, so actually anything but gas will do) the influence on the overall conduction is not too great. I found orange gue remover followed by lighter fluid a very good combo to get even very old thermal pad residue of hot CPU's and heatsinks.
Now, the main question about heatsinks is usually not the thermal grease but the ability of the heat sink to get rid of heat conducted into it (unless of course your CPU monitor reads 70 C and your heatsink is cold to the touch). I'd clean CPU and heatsink any way you like it, maybe lap the heatsink with some valve paste, then try the AS5. Only if that doesn't get you somewhere in the acceptable range temperature wise would I look into a new heatsink.
 
Haha, my thoughts exactly about the stone tablets from a mountain. Anyway, thanks for the advice.
 
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