too much tim is not a good thing

[aixenv]

well first go at building my system i wasnt too sure how much as5 to use so i just used an educated guess and tried not to apply to much, fast forward to system built and in windows and thinking about an oc, well i was idling 42-44, obviously not horrible but with an xp-90 and a tornado on the top i figured i'd have some killer temps

i decided to disassemble the box and take off all the as5 and clean the heatsink/die up then reappy the as5 basing my instructions on the as tim instructions link on their website, well that being said, i rebuilt my system and was running in bios cpu temps of 29-31, went into windows and both corespeed and mbm5 said i was doing 31-32c on the cpu and 18-21 on the case, that's a TEN DEGREE DIFFERENCE, i found that very interesting. make sure to apply the right amount of TIM or you may not get your desired target temps!

 

[lockmac]

Amen to that. The amount of times I hear people not doing this correctly. It may seem like a minor thing, but applying this correctly can be the difference between a fried system and a working system

 

[CheesePoofs]

Yeah, thats very true. My friend had a 9800 pro that was running fine and he decided to replace the stock cooler with a better one. He applied a very think layer of AS5 and a few weeks later, it died. He overclocked a little with the new cooler, so my assumption is the new cooler with the thick layer of AS5 cooled worse than the stock heatsink, so the added heat of overclocking fried his card.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I don't know about the ATI 9800's, but the nVidia FX5950 has an on-board thermal sensor for the GPU, which can be read from accessing the proper nVidia tab under the Windows "Display" properties.

Thing is -- I've used Arctic Silver with the Zalman VGA heatpipe-heatsink coolers -- the ZM80 line. It seems to work fine in that context, but those aluminum heatsinks have some sort of metallized blue, gold or black finish. But, like I said, I just applied the stuff in the same sparing quantities as one uses on the CPU cap, and "No problemo, Amigo . . . "

 

[CheesePoofs]

Originally posted by: BonzaiDuck
I don't know about the ATI 9800's, but the nVidia FX5950 has an on-board thermal sensor for the GPU, which can be read from accessing the proper nVidia tab under the Windows "Display" properties.

The R350 core 9800's (the earlier ones) didn't have a thermal sensor, but the R360 core ones (which were used in the 9800xt and newer 9800pro's) did. His didn't have a thermal sensor when he flashed it to an XT, which is what you needed to do on the 9800pro's to unlock the thermal sensor, so i believe it was an R350.

 

[SkyBum]

Pretty funny thermal paste comparison excerpted from here., in which he compares several different thermal pastes (including toothpaste and vegemite just for the hell of it). Seems that at least in the short term, the toothpaste outperformed AS3 (emphasis on SHORT TERM) Pretty hilarious......

First: Toothpaste.

Depending on the labelling laws where you live, the only ingredient listed on the side of a tube of fluoride toothpaste may be sodium monofluorophosphate. Sodium monofluorophosphate or sodium fluoride are the only active ingredient, in the medicinal sense, in normal fluoride toothpaste. There's also stuff to give the paste the right consistency, stuff to help it foam up, a mildly abrasive polishing ingredient, probably dicalcium phosphate dihydrate, and stuff to make it taste less like chalk jelly. It's water based, which makes it inherently useless as a real thermal transfer agent, because it'll dry out quite quickly. It may also cause corrosion.

There was nothing besides common sense stopping me from doing a quick test with the stuff, though, so I spread some on the 6Cu+'s base. The toothpaste I chose turned out to be slightly runnier than Arctic Silver 3, in case you care; it's pretty easy to spread it very thin. I put on a thicker layer, though; "optimising heat sink toothpaste application" is not something I intend to put on my curriculum vitae.

Firing up my Minty Fresh Thermal Transfer Experiment produced, rather hilariously, an excellent score - 0.47°C/W.

That's right - Toothpaste Superior To Arctic Silver 3! Film At Eleven!

This was only over half an hour, though. When I removed the cooler from the heater, the toothpaste that'd been squished out around the edge of the contact patch was already dry and crusty, and the rest of the paste would follow soon enough. It'd be just minty white dust inside a week, and probably wouldn't work much better than no thermal compound at all. Maybe worse.

But in the short term, and assuming you don't bridge any contacts with it (it's sufficiently conductive to cause problems), it would seem that toothpaste works just fine as thermal compound. If you're almost out of genuine thermal goop, can't get any more right away, and know you're going to be reseating a processor cooler umpteen times as you fool around with whatever it is with which you are fooling around - well, you can probably make do with toothpaste.

If you think I'm making some sort of guarantee that it won't cause unspeakably awful consequences, though, you're out of your mind. All care, no responsibility.

Actually, not even very much care.

On to the Vegemite.

Vegemite's runny compared with thermal goop, as well; nearly all of the Vegemite I applied squished out around the edges of the contact patch once the heat was on, and it then started drying out rapidly, just like the toothpaste. But the stuff still delivered a solid 0.48°C/W result.

the more serious parts of the comparison can be found at the link above.....

 

[ScottFern]

Just bookmarked their instructions, I have some AS5 and a VGA Cooler Rev5 on the way!