Artic Silver thermal compound
 

Has anyone used Arctic Silver instead of regular grease for
Convergence modules? I wonder if it makes a difference in the
compared to the regular white stuff.

One of the motherboard webpages (Toms?) did a comparison with the
ordinary stuff and found it made not one bit of difference which type
you used, the temperature difference was within the margin of error for
the test. The fact is that there is only a very tiny amount of grease
used to fill the gap between the chip and heatsink, I would expect same
is true for most heatsink applications unless the mating surfaces were
unusually rough.

LB wrote:

Has anyone used Arctic Silver instead of regular grease for
Convergence modules? I wonder if it makes a difference in the
compared to the regular white stuff.





--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"

The Lost Deep Thoughts By: Jack Handey
Before a mad scientist goes mad, there's probably a time
when he's only partially mad. And this is the time when he's
going to throw his best parties.

That's very interesting.

Loads of people into 'modding' computers, always choose arctic silver
over any other compound or paste.

Is it just marketing hype and the reputation?

Thermal conductivity is about 8.4
for arctic silver, a quick search on one of my chinese supplier's
website were selling a silver compound with TC of 4.7mW/K.

Does this mean the cheaper one has a higher heat capacitance than
arctic silver?

"gabe" wrote in message
...
That's very interesting.

Loads of people into 'modding' computers, always choose arctic silver
over any other compound or paste.

Is it just marketing hype and the reputation?



Probably, think of the typical overclocking crowd, very few of them are
engineers, people will buy all sorts of snake oil if they percieve it'll get
them that extra .02%.

Yes, have a look here at Tom's Hardware
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020916/cooler-02.html

Wayne

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 05:21:44 GMT, **THE-RFI-EMI-GUY**
wrote:

One of the motherboard webpages (Toms?) did a comparison with the
ordinary stuff and found it made not one bit of difference which type
you used, the temperature difference was within the margin of error for
the test. The fact is that there is only a very tiny amount of grease
used to fill the gap between the chip and heatsink, I would expect same
is true for most heatsink applications unless the mating surfaces were
unusually rough.

LB wrote:

Has anyone used Arctic Silver instead of regular grease for
Convergence modules? I wonder if it makes a difference in the
compared to the regular white stuff.





--
Joe Leikhim K4SAT
"The RFI-EMI-GUY"

The Lost Deep Thoughts By: Jack Handey
Before a mad scientist goes mad, there's probably a time
when he's only partially mad. And this is the time when he's
going to throw his best parties.

LB wrote:

Has anyone used Arctic Silver instead

THE-RFI-EMI-GUY wrote:

unless the mating surfaces were
unusually rough.

Not so much rough, LARGE. Look at an Athlon processor and you can see
the mating surface is about a square inch, and it's supposed to have 23
POUNDS of force applied to it. This is of course the reason that
alignment is so critical.

This surface is so large that you can't even begin to approach 23
pounds per square inch. Some manufacturers are giving up on screwing
them down because you need to almost strip the threads out of aluminum
to get the force. It could also warp the device, and in some cases the
heatsink ! These things range from approx. 8-20 square inches. Multiply
that by 23 and see what you get.

To the OP: If you are trying to do the optimum job there are bigger
fish to fry than what brand of goop you use, on these larger mating
surfaces it MUST be applied in a bead running directly between the
mounting holes, DO NOT spread it out, that causes air pockets. If the
Arctic is lower in viscosity then it might be a real good alternative,
and the lower the better, but you better watch one thing, does it
become glue after awhile ? The optimum repair does not screw up a
subsequent repair. I've had to use a hammer to release the chips from
the heatsink, and if this stuff makes a better bond it might be worse.
I think I'll stick with the white stuff for this application.

I don't mean processors, I mean those big STK chips. It's not quite
apples and oranges, it's more like pears and kiwi.

JURB