Homemade Thermal Grease

[JLD1989]

So, my cooling fan recently went out on my GPU. Had a similar heat sync and fan lying around so I snagged the fan off of it and got the fan up and going again. However I found myself without thermal paste. Started looking into some alternatives I might be able to cook up at home. I really didn't find much online so I took a shot at it with what I could find on hand. Ended up mixing a paste that uses silicone caulking and graphite that I snagged from a pencil and milled down to a fine powder. The graphite has excellent heat conductivity and I have been running it for about a week now. Right now my load temps are at 78C during an intense gaming session in an 80 degree room and I have been idling at about 42C. My question is do you think I would be safe to use this home brew paste for a few more weeks until I can afford some arctic silver or should I back off the gaming for a bit?

 

[Jaxem]

Those are surprisingly passable temps for something you cooked up yourself, so i would hesitantly say yes, you should be okay for a bit longer...then again, silicone tends to be quite a bit thicker than thermal paste (at least the kind i'm thinking), which could lead to you having some air bubbles, which cause hotspots, which causes burnout/magic smoke...so it's your call, but it does sound a little risky.

 

[Ubrales]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums!

I am in the process of making my own thermal compound using real diamond dust. I posted my question in 'New Builds' section and recieved some good responses.

What you did is a decent temporary solution. Graphite is electrically conductive. Change over to Arctic Silver 5 as soon as you can.

 

[Ubrales]

Here it is: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2072175/diamond-powder-thermal-compound.html

 

[Jacob McIntosh]

I think that I'll just lurk here in the corner and see how this plays out...

+1 to being creative!

 

[panos1]

I think that there is too much effort and risk here for something that you can order from china for less than 1Euro or you can buy from USA or EU for around 5Euro.

 

[Jacob McIntosh]

I think that there is too much effort and risk here for something that you can order from china for less than 1Euro or you can buy from USA or EU for around 5Euro.

Yes, it would be safer to just go out and buy some, but to be able to say that you made your own thermal paste, and it works...

 

[JLD1989]

Finally saved up the capital to buy some paste. Temps dropped by about 5c on load and 2c on idle.