{"id":1332,"date":"2013-11-28T14:09:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T14:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/?p=1332"},"modified":"2013-11-28T14:12:40","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T14:12:40","slug":"thermal-paste-does-make-a-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/?p=1332","title":{"rendered":"Thermal paste DOES make a difference!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve never really appreciated just how much of a difference different thermal pastes can make. I’ve an old IBM \/ Lenovo ThinkPad x60. Over the years I’ve noticed it have a few thermal shutdowns during particularly CPU intensive tasks, for instance during a Linux kernel compilation or a TrueCrypt partition encryption. I’ve always just figured that “it was one of those bad designs” that could not be improved upon.<\/p>\n

Anyway, last night it had a thermal event while applying Microsoft patches!! Hmm. I figured this was a bit much. Once before I did open it up and check the fan for lint and dust but it made no difference. I’m not sure why but last night’s shut-down annoyed me and I decided to try an improve the situation. So I decided to follow this blog post<\/a> about stripping down an X60 to replace the fan. I wanted to double check the dust and lint situation and also replace the thermal paste on the CPU.<\/p>\n

Once I undid all the screws and unattached various wires and ribbon cables I had access to the CPU cooling components. The thermal paste looked OK but it was to be replaced. I had some Arctic MX-4 on hand which I was going to use. I cleaned the CPU and heat sink as best I could using a lint free cloth and an\u00a0isopropanol based cleaning liquid. I applied some new thermal paste and spread it quite thinly. I reassembled the laptop (not sure it will ever be the same!!) and somehow managed to have no screws left over!<\/p>\n

I fired up the laptop and all looked OK. I started running Prime95 to generate load and the CPU temperature (as shown by CPUID HWMonitor) is hovering around 87 deg C. Last night I noticed it getting up to about 92-95 degrees. So, a new layer of thermal paste has dropped the CPU temperature by 5-8 degrees. More importantly, however, for me is that the laptop is running Prime95 without having any thermal events.<\/p>\n

I know the over-clocking community has various recommendations for which thermal paste to use – but it seems it is relevant even for unmodified PCs!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve never really appreciated just how much of a difference different thermal pastes can make. I’ve an old IBM \/ Lenovo ThinkPad x60. Over the years I’ve noticed it have a few thermal shutdowns during particularly CPU intensive tasks, for instance during a Linux kernel compilation or a TrueCrypt partition encryption. I’ve always just figured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[188,189],"class_list":["post-1332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical","tag-thermal","tag-x60"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1332"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.michaelm.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}