Clean your heatsink!

N

niconx

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 26, 2004
Messages
2,952
Just a reminder to clean your heatsink. I forgot all about it this month and then my computer wouldn't reboot. Then I notice the CPU fan was unable to keep spinning for more then a second. I pulled the fan off and the surface of my thermalright ultima 90 was completely blocked with dust. No wonder the fan died. My load temps went down from 56C to 44C!
 
Uh, if you apply the thermal compound correctly you shouldn't need to maintain your heatsink for years, or until you replace the CPU or remove it.
 
LearninToBuild said:
Uh, if you apply the thermal compound correctly you shouldn't need to maintain your heatsink for years, or until you replace the CPU or remove it.
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Thermal compound has nothing to do with dust accumulation in the heatsink fins. You need to periodically clean out your heatsink, otherwise it will get clogged with dust, preventing air from getting through and causing your temperatures to rise dramatically. One of the most common problems with computers is a lack of cleaning leading to heat issues that cause the CPU to throttle and reduce performance, and issues with dust getting into PSUs and causing them to overheat and die. Unless you have a case with dust filters over all the intake fans, you should clean out your computer at least every 1-2 months (and if you do have filters, you need to clean those frequently as well, and you should clear out the inside of your case at least twice a year).
 
niconx said:
Just a reminder to clean your heatsink. I forgot all about it this month and then my computer wouldn't reboot. Then I notice the CPU fan was unable to keep spinning for more then a second. I pulled the fan off and the surface of my thermalright ultima 90 was completely blocked with dust. No wonder the fan died. My load temps went down from 56C to 44C!
Click to expand...

Smokers in the house?
 
brom42 said:
Smokers in the house?
Click to expand...

Yes :mad: not to mention many other things. Dust is impossible to control here, it builds up fast. I never even took the heatsink out of the case, I used some tissues to wipe the fins clean and that did the job.
 
Zero82z said:
Thermal compound has nothing to do with dust accumulation in the heatsink fins. You need to periodically clean out your heatsink, otherwise it will get clogged with dust, preventing air from getting through and causing your temperatures to rise dramatically. One of the most common problems with computers is a lack of cleaning leading to heat issues that cause the CPU to throttle and reduce performance, and issues with dust getting into PSUs and causing them to overheat and die. Unless you have a case with dust filters over all the intake fans, you should clean out your computer at least every 1-2 months (and if you do have filters, you need to clean those frequently as well, and you should clear out the inside of your case at least twice a year).
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Oh okay, I misunderstood.

Cheers. :p
 
niconx said:
Yes :mad: not to mention many other things. Dust is impossible to control here, it builds up fast. I never even took the heatsink out of the case, I used some tissues to wipe the fins clean and that did the job.
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Well there's your problem. The tar in the smoke makes the dust sticky. Back when I did repair on the side, I would refuse computers from people who smoked in their homes. It made their computers absolutely disgusting and caused everything to clog with the sticky, tarry, smells like ass dust.
 
They should make the edges of fins rounded smooth and coat em with nickel. Damn things wouldn't pickup any dust at all then. As it is they are very blunt and have so much surface friction they just ask for dust to stick.
 
What we need are tiny heatsinks - just little slivers actually - of the same type of material used on the Space Shuttle's heat-resistant/absorbing tiles. Man, if that formula could just be duplicated, holy shit...

That stuff absolutely 0WNZ (yes, I can speak l33t as required, I'm old) when it comes to heat absorption and dissipation. You could probably run a chip well into the 5, 6 GHz range without breaking a sweat... (no pun intended)

Maybe someday. Been dreaming of that for 25+ years now, and honestly, even on a Core i7 CPU you could just put a sliver of it about as thick as a quarter on the heatspreader and it would suck away the CPU temps like nothing else ever made.

Dammit, I thought all the neat shit that NASA invents trickles down into regular society after some period of time... Shuttles and those tiles have been around over 30 years now, let's have that formula dammit (it's considered a "top secret" thing, sadly). Kinda ridiculous considering...

If we could manufacturer entire engine blocks from it, vehicles would run so cool it's not even funny. I remember seeing a video long long ago of a real "rocket scientist" putting a 1" cube of the stuff in a furnace running it up to a few thousand degrees Fahrenheit, then taking it out in a pair of Teflon coated heat resistant tongs, and the cube was white hot, and I mean white like a sheet of copy paper white. He took off the asbestos gloves and held it in his bare hand, on camera, only seconds after pulling it from that oven.

The stuff dissipates heat internally so it's cool to the touch... here's a video that gives some ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuSlkEob-3w&NR=1

If that stuff is really available at the KSC gift shop for a few bucks, people need to grab it quick because there just ain't nothing better for heat protection... geez... a one inch block of it would cover 10 CPUs... just gotta slice it thin ;) Totally passive superultrahellacooling... with a piece of ceramic composite!!!

Edit:

w00t!!!!
http://www.thespaceshop.com/shuttilin.html

There ya go... order some, cut to fit, put it on a CPU, I doubt you'll ever need a fan again. :) Copper... water, ain't got nothing on this stuff.
 
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brom42 said:
Well there's your problem. The tar in the smoke makes the dust sticky. Back when I did repair on the side, I would refuse computers from people who smoked in their homes. It made their computers absolutely disgusting and caused everything to clog with the sticky, tarry, smells like ass dust.
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Yeah, and if their computer dies, tell them that their computer died from lung cancer!
 
I always blow my TRUE/U12P out with canned air and there's still some dust 'clinging on'. I guess technically you can rinse them under the faucet too, couldn't you...?
 
Joe Average said:
The stuff dissipates heat internally so it's cool to the touch... here's a video that gives some ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuSlkEob-3w&NR=1

If that stuff is really available at the KSC gift shop for a few bucks, people need to grab it quick because there just ain't nothing better for heat protection... geez... a one inch block of it would cover 10 CPUs... just gotta slice it thin ;) Totally passive superultrahellacooling... with a piece of ceramic composite!!!

Edit:

w00t!!!!
http://www.thespaceshop.com/shuttilin.html

There ya go... order some, cut to fit, put it on a CPU, I doubt you'll ever need a fan again. :) Copper... water, ain't got nothing on this stuff.
Click to expand...


It almost looks like it ignores heat. Don't think that would be very good at all for absorbing and dissipating?
 
Joe Average said:
What we need are tiny heatsinks - just little slivers actually - of the same type of material used on the Space Shuttle's heat-resistant/absorbing tiles. Man, if that formula could just be duplicated, holy shit...

That stuff absolutely 0WNZ (yes, I can speak l33t as required, I'm old) when it comes to heat absorption and dissipation. You could probably run a chip well into the 5, 6 GHz range without breaking a sweat... (no pun intended)

Maybe someday. Been dreaming of that for 25+ years now, and honestly, even on a Core i7 CPU you could just put a sliver of it about as thick as a quarter on the heatspreader and it would suck away the CPU temps like nothing else ever made.

Dammit, I thought all the neat shit that NASA invents trickles down into regular society after some period of time... Shuttles and those tiles have been around over 30 years now, let's have that formula dammit (it's considered a "top secret" thing, sadly). Kinda ridiculous considering...

If we could manufacturer entire engine blocks from it, vehicles would run so cool it's not even funny. I remember seeing a video long long ago of a real "rocket scientist" putting a 1" cube of the stuff in a furnace running it up to a few thousand degrees Fahrenheit, then taking it out in a pair of Teflon coated heat resistant tongs, and the cube was white hot, and I mean white like a sheet of copy paper white. He took off the asbestos gloves and held it in his bare hand, on camera, only seconds after pulling it from that oven.

The stuff dissipates heat internally so it's cool to the touch... here's a video that gives some ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuSlkEob-3w&NR=1

If that stuff is really available at the KSC gift shop for a few bucks, people need to grab it quick because there just ain't nothing better for heat protection... geez... a one inch block of it would cover 10 CPUs... just gotta slice it thin ;) Totally passive superultrahellacooling... with a piece of ceramic composite!!!

Edit:

w00t!!!!
http://www.thespaceshop.com/shuttilin.html

There ya go... order some, cut to fit, put it on a CPU, I doubt you'll ever need a fan again. :) Copper... water, ain't got nothing on this stuff.
Click to expand...

That sounds absolutely amazing.. is the stuff from that Yahoo shop legit? Please let us know, because it sounds banging!

--Bob The Savage
 
Joe Average said:
What we need are tiny heatsinks - just little slivers actually - of the same type of material used on the Space Shuttle's heat-resistant/absorbing tiles. Man, if that formula could just be duplicated, holy shit...

That stuff absolutely 0WNZ (yes, I can speak l33t as required, I'm old) when it comes to heat absorption and dissipation. You could probably run a chip well into the 5, 6 GHz range without breaking a sweat... (no pun intended)

Maybe someday. Been dreaming of that for 25+ years now, and honestly, even on a Core i7 CPU you could just put a sliver of it about as thick as a quarter on the heatspreader and it would suck away the CPU temps like nothing else ever made.

Dammit, I thought all the neat shit that NASA invents trickles down into regular society after some period of time... Shuttles and those tiles have been around over 30 years now, let's have that formula dammit (it's considered a "top secret" thing, sadly). Kinda ridiculous considering...

If we could manufacturer entire engine blocks from it, vehicles would run so cool it's not even funny. I remember seeing a video long long ago of a real "rocket scientist" putting a 1" cube of the stuff in a furnace running it up to a few thousand degrees Fahrenheit, then taking it out in a pair of Teflon coated heat resistant tongs, and the cube was white hot, and I mean white like a sheet of copy paper white. He took off the asbestos gloves and held it in his bare hand, on camera, only seconds after pulling it from that oven.

The stuff dissipates heat internally so it's cool to the touch... here's a video that gives some ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuSlkEob-3w&NR=1

If that stuff is really available at the KSC gift shop for a few bucks, people need to grab it quick because there just ain't nothing better for heat protection... geez... a one inch block of it would cover 10 CPUs... just gotta slice it thin ;) Totally passive superultrahellacooling... with a piece of ceramic composite!!!

Edit:

w00t!!!!
http://www.thespaceshop.com/shuttilin.html

There ya go... order some, cut to fit, put it on a CPU, I doubt you'll ever need a fan again. :) Copper... water, ain't got nothing on this stuff.
Click to expand...

By no means am I an expert on this, but I would expect a material like this to have a very high specific heat capacity, but very very (very) low thermal conductivity. This would allow it to absorb a tremendous amount of heat, but would also make it extremely resistant to absorbing heat in the first place. That first video is impressive, but is the block absorbing the heat from the torch, or resisting it?

EDIT:

I realized I repeated strend's question. Props to you good sir.
 
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exactly my question. either it sucks up the heat and kills it almost instantly or it completely ignores it meaning the block would actually increase CPU temps tremendously by not allowing the heat out. Anyone got an old CPU to try this on? Aluminium foil can sit in a 400 degree oven for an hour and still be cool to the touch after taking it out so whats the difference here?
 
strend said:
It almost looks like it ignores heat. Don't think that would be very good at all for absorbing and dissipating?
Click to expand...
eggz said:
By no means am I an expert on this, but I would expect a material like this to have a very high specific heat capacity, but very very (very) low thermal conductivity. This would allow it to absorb a tremendous amount of heat, but would also make it extremely resistant to absorbing heat in the first place. That first video is impressive, but is the block absorbing the heat from the torch, or resisting it?

EDIT:

I realized I repeated strend's question. Props to you good sir.
Click to expand...
Silica glass (what those tiles are made of) has a thermal conductivity of about 1.3W/m*K. Aluminum has a thermal conductivity of about 237W/m*K, and copper about 401W/m*K. Granted these tiles are made from specially laid-out glass fibres, but I doubt that would have a significant impact on the actual thermal conductivity properties of the material. So this probably wouldn't be a very good material for making heatsinks.
 
The shuttle tiles are thermal insulators not thermal conductors, if you used them on your CPU then it would heat up faster. The shuttle isn't what gets hot, it's the air hitting the surface at hypersonic speed that generates heat on the surface. The tiles thermally insulate the shuttle surface from the rest of the shuttle structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protection_system

PS. Blowing people up into space isn't something I would call spaceflight. It's pretty cool and still amazing, but it's not spaceflight.
 
Zero82z said:
Silica glass (what those tiles are made of) has a thermal conductivity of about 1.3W/m*K. Aluminum has a thermal conductivity of about 237W/m*K, and copper about 401W/m*K...... So this probably wouldn't be a very good material for making heatsinks.
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But it would be an awesome material to make steering wheels, seat belt buckles, and other things that get about as hot as the sun while in a parked car.
 
Fnmeng said:
But it would be an awesome material to make steering wheels, seat belt buckles, and other things that get about as hot as the sun while in a parked car.
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Those tiles are very brittle and are not a very good building material. Basically the only thing they're really useful for is thermal insulation.
 
Lol... yeah... diamond will become the material of choice for cooling as prices come down. Already there are plans to make processors with layers of diamond in for electrical insulation and thermal conductivity.
 
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