Arctic Silver 5

[apeboyeee]

Hi guys,

I just bought some Arctic silver 5 and read the instructions on the website. It states that this is thermal grease, and not act as an adhesive. I always thought that it would glue the chip and the heatsink together...

So just a clarification. The the heatsink is pressed up againt the chip with the clips, and the thermal grease just sits between them? essentially a sandwich with the clips acting as the adhesive?

Thanks

Andy

 

[akira34]

The thermal compound/grease is to act as a medium between the processor and the heatsink. Without it, the heat wouldn't transfer (or not well at the very least) from the chip to the heatsink. For processors, the heatsink is [typically] held down by mechanical methods (such as clips, pins, or screws). Some northbridge heatsinks use thermal adhesive to hold onto the chip, but only because those are small and won't move enough to effect the cooling efficiency.

Thermal grease will stick, some, to the chip. But, the chip can be easily removed from the heatsink after. With thermal adhesive, you typically need to use some kind of solvent to properly remove the heatsink from the chip/item. You can (sometimes) heat the item up to losen the adhesive enough to remove it. The down side of that is that you risk causing heat damage to the item that you're removing the old heatsink from.

All of this should be common knowledge for anyone that's built a system in the past ~6 years.

 

[gobucks]

you don't want to use adhesive on anything you'll be wanting to remove later. So if you plan to upgrade your CPU, adhesive is bad, cause you'll have to yank it directly out along with the heatsink, possibly breaking pins. Adhesive is generally for stuff like northbridge heatsinks that you'll never need to remove again.

And while the AS5 is not an adhesive, you'd better believe it's gonna make great contact with the CPU and heatsink and it's not going anywhere. It is extremely thick, making great contact for better heat transmission. Its purpose is to conduct heat between the 2 surfaces, something that does not happen when there are gaps between the two. In fact, when i first removed my heatsink to change mobos, my CPU came out along with it, and there is a lot of force required to remove a CPU from its socket once the bar is placed down! This is normally bad, but luckily I didn't break any pins. Anyways, you probably DON'T want adhesive, and Arctic Silver 5 is simply the absolute best thermal compound available.

 

[apeboyeee]

Thanks guys

 

[fbrdphreak]

From what I hear, AS5 has a tendency to really stick between the CPU and heatsink. I haven't used it, but some people have almost sh!t themselves when pulling a CPU out with the heasink attached :Q
I have an old tube of AS3 that I hadn't used much of, but its running low and I'm going to order more AS3 while I can get it; I hear AS5 only improves cooling by like 1 degree C, so I would rather use AS3.