heatsink compound on pins

[CJP]

I just installed a new Pentium 4 cpu in my motherboard replacing an older one. I had trouble getting the new one to work at first so for various reasons I had to go back and forth between the two processors in the motherboard a few times. Anyway, when I got my new processor to work I noticed that there was a small amount of heatsink compound on a couple of pins on the old processor. It's possible that there might be some compound in the socket. What I want to know is how this would affect a processor? Would it make the processor not work at all if it was interfering or could it just slow things down from interfering with the contact of the socket and cpu. Like I said the new cpu runs but I was still wondering about this.

 

[Avalon]

What is the compound? It wouldn't happen to be Arctic Silver, would it? That stuff is slightly conductive. I think it could damage both your socket and your CPU if that's the compound you're using.

 

[CJP]

No it's just some cheap stuff I bought at a local small computer shop. It just came in a small white plastic package like a small McDonald's mustard packet. It only cost $3.00 and there was no brand on it so I'm pretty sure it's not Artic Silver.

 

[Avalon]

Hmm. I guess the only thing you have to worry about is that it's interfering with the CPU pins making good contact. I have no clue how you'd clean out a socket though. Try putting the CPU in and removing it, and see if goop is on the pins again. Clean it, and try again. That should get most of it off, unless you can think of a way to get the stuff out of the socket itself without damaging it.

 

[CJP]

Well, I've run a few benchmarks now and the increase in performance (30%) is about what it should be. Also, I've stress tested it for 4 hours with Prime95 and got no errors so I think that the pins must be contacting ok. I think that if there were a problem that it would just not work at all. I had a heck of a time getting it to run initially so I think I'm going to leave it be since it's running and like you said I don't know how to go about cleaning out a socket anyway. Thanks for the help Avalon,

Chris

 

[jhurst]

Would a conductive material like AS affect the conductivity between the pin and the board? I don't know why you would ever get compound on the pins (you should be pretty careful when handling CPU's).

 

[CJP]

Believe me, I was careful, for at least the first 5 times I had to re-install this cpu to try and get it to work. After a couple hours of repeated failure I was frustrated, got careless, goofed and got the compound on the pins of my original processor. It turned out that the reason the new cpu was dying after 30 seconds all the time was that the new heatsink I bought to go with it wasn't properly contacting the cpu. I put the heatsink that came with my original cpu on the new cpu and it worked.

 

[filename.exe]

I used toothpicks soaked in acetone. It worked... hopefully I'll never had to do that again though!

 

[Phynaz]

Wow, a 7 year old necro by a first poster. Is this a record?

 

[dawp]

nope, spammers do it all the time.

 

[podspi]

Wow, a 7 year old necro by a first poster. Is this a record?

Sad part is... I didn't even notice until you mentioned it. You would've thought the Pentium 4 would have tipped me off...