Cpu thermal paste, need help

[stefanlugic061]

My cpu was under big load and high temperatures so i changed thermal paste, i wanted to play a bit so i tried fcking hair conditioner( coconut oil) and now, under full load, my cpu (celeron b800) is at 50 C°. I was stresstesting it too and fans were on low speed all the time...Need explanation

 

[jay32267]

Seems the hair conditioner works pretty well.

 

[Karadjgne]

Thermal paste is a medium. That's all. Even something mirror polished still has microfine scratches, pits, craters irregularities that are too small for you to manually see. Application of 2 such surfaces, that being the cooler and the cpu lid just makes those irregularities exponentially higher as now you get huge air gaps where valleys sit on top of valleys. Those surfaces simply are not perfect. Thermal pastes fill the gaps and allow physical transmission of the heat through, instead of trying to pass that heat through air.

You can use any liquid based medium as a thermal paste, as long as it's some sort of conductor not a insulator. That means even toothpaste is viable, denture cream, coconut oil etc.

The problem with those compounds is they dry up, dissipate, evaporate, cook and change composition under the extremes of heat generated by a cpu. You are used to cpus being @ under 100°C, most ppl are. A cpu without a cooler can hit 250°C in seconds, more than enough to cause serious damage. Without something as a medium to transfer equally all that heat, everything not 100% covered is going to be a Hotspot and the cores underneath will suffer 250°C + in those minute spots. Considering the @5.5 Billion transistors at 14nm size under a Haswell lid, minute is actually pretty large.

So yeah, coconut oil will work. Temporarily. Anything from seconds to minutes to unknown. Depends on how long it takes to drip down into the cpu pins and short out the socket or dry up and crack, cooking the cpu, or shrink and leave open areas, cooking the cpu.

Your choice, but paste is paste for a reason, and tooth paste, or denture paste or hair conditioner isn't the same.

 

[Eximo]

Lots of tech outlets have tested various household products. Pretty much anything organic is usually okay. But as above, they will degrade quite quickly, decompose, rot, etc.

Worst as I recall were things like sugar based cremes that had been puffed up with air. Chocolate was also an insulator for some reason. Finely ground things like ketchup and mustard worked surprisingly well for short durations. Toothpastes with additives don't do well, but plain toothpaste was okay. Mayonnaise ate away at the metal quite quickly and turned into an icky goo.

Back in the day lapping was quite popular to remove as many micro fissures and scratches in the metal surfaces as possible. Then the tiniest amount of thermal compound was used between the two polished surfaces. The effect was to get as much metal-metal contact as possible, and it used to work fairly well. These days the non-soldered heat spreaders make this kind of pointless.

 

[Karadjgne]

Lapping was great for removing much of the concave surface of the ihs, which in turn made the ihs flatter overall allowing thinner and more evenly spread paste without the pond affect you'd normally get, thick paste in the middle. It was good if you never planned on rma, warranty or sale of the cpu.

Nowadays, with non-soldered lids and ½ashed tim jobs, delidding is far superior to lapping if done right.