Me when I have to use anti seize in the shop
I changed my GPU thermal paste 2 days ago. I guess I need to open it again and empty the rest of the tube.
How does someone get to know thermal paste is a requirement without accidentally seeing how it’s required?
This is like knowing petrol is needed for your new car, then just stopping at some point, referring to the note “Get petrol” and deciding pumping it into every orifice the car has is what that means. “I assume that’s what that meant. I’m in a rush. No time to Google how to pump this “petrol” thing into the car.”
Engine oil? Well, petrol comes from oil! Better fill it up! Air goes in the intake, and we need fuel and air to mix. Throw some in there!
I can’t remember the video but it was some dude from a major computer YouTube channel fillmed himself building a PC. He used a grounding strap that wasn’t grounded and did all this crazy crap. They ended up taking it down fairly quick but not before everyone made fun of it. I think even he used thermal paste though.
It was the verge lol
I saw another video where the famous YouTuber censored out the thermal paste pattern sort of as a joke but sort of genuinely heading off comments disagreeing with how he put it on.
Oops all thermal paste!
It’s not glue lol.
It’s paste. Which means it’s edible. 😌
“A dab’ll do ya.”
Oh no, oh no no no no no.
This actually looks like pretty much perfect application, probably from the factory done by a machine. The contact looks very good and there isn’t too much that squeezed out the sides. With thermal paste, too much isn’t an issue, it will squish out the sides and just be wasted but not hurting anything. Too little is an issue, as it will cause overheating and might even make the device unusable or dead. So for machine applications they always do a little bit more than really needed.
But in this case I think they got it bang on, for the CPU it didn’t even leak all over the contact frame, but did get the entire chip itself. Same for the GPU on the right, nothing on the contact frame, but excellent contact on the chip. The pattern it left there indicates absolute perfect contact.
Optimal thermal paste thickness (bond-line thickness) is critical for heat dissipation. The layer should be thin, ideally between 25 µm and 50 µm, which is roughly the thickness of two sheets of standard paper. The paste’s sole purpose is to fill microscopic air pockets between the metal surfaces for better thermal conduction. Source, I spent 6 months in a laboratory experimenting with and producing thermal pastes and insulators. I spent days cutting and cleaning copper squares, applying the experimental pastes, and testing thermal conductivity via the application of Fourier’s Law of heat conduction.
Q = kA(Δ T/Δ X)
Where Q is heat flow, A is the cross-sectional area, and Δ x is the paste’s thickness.
That’s way more paste than you need for 50 µm application.
Drops Mic
To add to this to much is also a problem because it can trap air itself and create air pockets that way
Did you say 50mm of thermal paste?
I think he said 50m…
50 miles is too far for paste
Microns, not milimeters. One micron in 1/1000 of a milimeter.
Ah, my bad. 1000. So 50km of thermal paste?
You sure its not megameters?
You heard it from the expert, folks, 50magnets
No! There’s no way to measure 50km accurately in your house. He obviously meant 50kg.
Back in the Athlon days before heat spreaders everyone wrote about lapping the heatsink on glass so less thermal paste could be used.
I can’t tell if this is satire. If not, you say it doesn’t hurt to use too much, but I would say that a company would want to save all the money wasted on applying 20x the required amount…
Not satire, this is actually the perfect amount. Of it were actually too much, it would squeeze out the sides. It didn’t, so it’s actually the right amount.
The perfect amount would be a very thin layer, evenly distributed with zero waste. This is very much not that. At best you could argue it’s a quick way to do it that is worth the trade-off, except for the valid point the other commenter made about too much actually reducing heat conduction.
Love how you ignored my response to your response that provided a scientific rationale demonstrating that you don’t have a clear understanding of how thermal paste works, and you just doubled down on flawed opinions. Carry on friend.
Edit: Based on the law of heat conduction, as the paste thickness rises it will reduce heat flow based on the math of the formula. Less is more.
Meh, I don’t think it’s worth having a discussion about to be honest.
There is a HUGE difference between the perfect optimal application of thermal paste and the reality of manufacturing devices with thermal paste.
Like I said, this paste is applied by a machine, it’s extruded automatically from a dispenser. They don’t want to use too much, because it costs more (although thermal paste at large scales is very cheap and it’s not like they are using a super specialized Thermal Grizzly product, just run of the mill thermal paste). But they very much don’t want to use too little, because if they use too little the device will overheat. The increased rate of RMA is much more costly than the entire stock of thermal paste used for the device. Especially on CPUs with specific hot spots, that need coverage.
If we look at the image the coverage is perfect, not a single bit of the chip is uncovered. So they didn’t use too little, which means it’s already a win.
Now the question is did they use too much? Not really. The thermal paste has a known viscosity and the heatsink has a known mounting pressure. These two combined will make sure the layer of thermal paste in between is actually optimised in terms of layer thickness. The excess material will just squish out the sides under the mounting pressure.
But when we actually look at the image, we don’t see a lot squished out the side at all. Like I said the contact frame is still visible. If it were actually too much that would be totally covered. I also think it looks like more than it actually is. The marble pattern we see in the paste indicates very good contact between the heatsink and the chip, indicating good and even contact pressure. And especially when looking at the GPU, that pattern is absolutely perfect.
Could someone redo this paste by hand, use less and get an even better layer thickness? Sure! Would that really matter? Not really, it might improve thermals by 1 or 2 degrees C. It will have no impact on the actual functionality of the device, it’s lifespan or capabilities. It would on the other hand take a lot of work and an expert hand to do so. Which means it either needs to be done by a human, which is expensive, or some fancy machine would also be expensive. Why would they spend that money, on something that has zero impact on the end product?
They could probably use the exact same machine, load it up with some better quality thermal grease and get the same improvement if they wanted to. At minimal costs.
The rules are just a little bit different when it comes to industrial scale engineering. There’s more to consider than just what the perfect application of thermal grease would be.
If you want some more info about the real world application of thermal paste in computers, here is an article from Gamersnexus thoroughly debunking the “too much thermal paste” argument.
https://gamersnexus.net/guides/3346-thermal-paste-application-benchmark-too-much-thermal-paste
The best part was being accused of being a troll. There is no sense in playing chess with pigeons, they just knock all the pieces around, shit on the board, then claim they won the game.
did your article measure aging? assuming you didn’t fry your PC with the excess paste, there is no edge seal on voids when you use too much. over time most paste will dry and crack, creating new voids and hot spots. there is a difference between hour old transfer compound and 2 year old compound.
not worth discussing
Writes a novel
this has got to be a troll post. right? RIGHT?!
as you pointed out, just get rid of the air gaps with the absolute minimal amount of paste.
my back woods method
ensure your heat sink does not have pre-applied paste or a pad. apply a small amount of paste. cut the thickness with the short edge of an old credit card at about a 30° angle, using just enough pressure to bend the card slightly so the smooth surface of the card presses paste into voids and the trailing edge of the card removes excess to level the surface - you will likely still be able to make out some chip package markings through the paste. remove all edge excess and spillage. fit your heat sink. done.
At that point it’s just thermal paste with slight hints of computer.
if they had to put some in their mouth, they should have used mayo instead.
They mayo goes in the computer and I’d like a ham and cheese on rye with extra thermal paste.
They graduated from eating Elmer’s paste to Noctua paste
That’s one expensive transition
Don’t do this
Yeah: Use a paintbrush to cover the whole motherboard instead.
Get a couple cans of spray thermal paste.
Fill up the entire case until it is one big block. The smoke is just the paste settling. And the flames. Also the Fire department. It is settling.
Not sure I see a problem here, this all looks intended. I’m not familiar with this device though
Thermal compound has a thermal resistance. It’s better than air, but not as good as metal. The best application is a layer that fills all the air gaps, and no more.
Who is saying that is the major consideration here?
Its obvious the major problem here is ustable movement and flexing when those large sink plates are screwed down will not distribute the paste very well resulting in a higher risk of air gaps. So they left a lot of room for it to press out and it doesn’t look like they used a ton of that space.
Adding to this… Airgaps is not emphasized enough here. There is a reason why you don’t do closed shapes when applying thermal paste, and why so many system builders have strong opinions on how to apply it.
Personally, I go for an X or a % where the os are actually dots.
I still do the just under pea sized amount right in the middle, have always gotten a good spread with it.
Each of those chips have basically half a container on them, so I’m not sure how anyone got the idea they should use that much.
I paid for the whole container, and by god I’m going to use it!
The industrial containers I had the pleasure of producing and shipping could all be re-sealed for later (industrial) use. Are the options available for commercial use not able to be re-sealed for later use? As long as it’s properly sealed it can be good for 2-5 years.
Yes there are many kinds of resealable containers for commercially sold pastes. Syringes with caps are very common. I’ve also definitely used pastes older than that and they worked great, but they were also expensive after-market pastes stored at room temp.
In my old job we could order toothpaste sized thermal pastes, right down to the same caps. I have seen someone use a whole ass colgate worth on one laptop…
Back in the very early 2000s a friend on mine that I thought was pretty technical heard me talking about thermal paste and he had never used any. After telling him about the benefits he was excited to get some and use it on his new PC he was building. He came in the next day sad, said it had fried and he thinks it was the paste. I asked how much he put on and his response was “umm, like icing on a cake”. in my head it was even worse the the posted image.
Oof, it’s nice that most thermal paste these days is non-conductive
The only thing too much thermal paste does is leave a mess, but you might need thermal pads on VRMs for better contact
Wouldn’t sharing heat from a processor directly with other chips be a bad thing? Always imagined you could fry the little chips by the CPU or GPU or whatever you’re cooling
The chips are going to have a similar tolerance to heat. They’re all silicon and the fundamentals of how they work are the same. So if may be making a chip hotter than it normally would get, but still within its operational limits it’ll still work fine.
Though there is the argument that if the chip otherwise wouldn’t get that hot that you’re subjecting it to more thermal stress by subjecting it to wider temperature swings than it would otherwise experience. However, I wouldn’t worry too much about that as by the time that might be a problem, something else would have given out long before that.
Too much thermal grease is a barrier to heat, because it should only replace the air (a potent thermal insulator) between uneven surfaces. Oil would be better, but that runs away.
Which os also why you shouldn’t smear the grease, because then you get air pockets. Rice corn or spaghetti method displaces the air on putting the cooler on.
Rice corn or spaghetti method displaces the air on putting the cooler on.
I’m not familiar with those methods and “rice corn or spaghetti” makes me think you boil the the paste first
Is it odd that this is not even close to “bad” I have seen? Hell I have seem things shipped from production with this level of glorp.
