Applying thermal grease to Heatpipe Direct Touch coolers
siruspernot
TN
Hi. I'm about to get my first H.D.T cooler. The Core-Contact Freezer for L775 Intel. It like many others now have the heatpipes exposed as the actual base. It however has tiny trenches in between the heat pipes. Normally when applying thermal grease you use as little as possible because on an ideal setup, it spreads micron thin.
What do I do about these trenches? I thought I would just fill them in and use something like a credit card to make a perfectly smooth surface across the baseplate. Then I thought when it heats up it might drizzle out onto my board. I think now maybe I should just very lightly cover the heat pipes since they actually touch the processor plate and avoid any excess.
Can anyone share any experiences? I'll be using Arctic Silver 5. Thanks.
What do I do about these trenches? I thought I would just fill them in and use something like a credit card to make a perfectly smooth surface across the baseplate. Then I thought when it heats up it might drizzle out onto my board. I think now maybe I should just very lightly cover the heat pipes since they actually touch the processor plate and avoid any excess.
Can anyone share any experiences? I'll be using Arctic Silver 5. Thanks.
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Comments
Leo, that is a great link. I have a cpu cooler with a heatpipe base and have tried various amounts of thermal paste. That explains why I got such bad results when I used less thermal compound. Those grooves are not filled in.
Hrmm.. neeed more AS5
It's sooooo much easier to apply. I put three thin lines down the heat pipes on my Xigmatek and got full coverage.
I recently switched to that Tuniq MX-2 also, it came with my CCF so I tried it out. It works awesome. I even used it to replace the factory pad under my gpu cooler. It dropped my gpu temps about 5 degrees C. I also noticed that as time has went on with it temps have gotten even lower on my cpu as well.
On a related note, I had an old Xbox 360 upstairs with the 3 red ring issue and E 71 (1013) error issue. I put this stuff under the heatsinks and bent those x brackets to give it more tension. The 3 red ring issue went away but i'm still stuck with the E 71 (bad update) issue. Even used the NXE update disk, must be bad flash memory.
MX-2 is good stuff.
Btw, my Q6600 is at 3.0 Ghz on Water cooling. I think 60C is a bit hot imo, what do you think?
Back when I started Q6600 *fun around a year ago I scoured the Internet for anything I could find concerning Q6600 overclocking and safe operating temperatures, for both the B3 and G0 steppings. Really, 60C is not an issue.
*one of the all time great CPUs, IMO