

Make your own diamond-based thermal grease - profquail
http://inventgeek.com/Projects/DiamondGrease/overview.aspx

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jrockway
That coating of thermal grease looks WAY too thick.

It also looks like he's measuring the temperature of the heat sink rather than
the temperature of the die. If your thermal compound is acting as an
insulator, then your heat sink is going to be nice and cold. (That smoke you
smell is your processor melting through the bottom of your case, however.)

Finally, if you want to test heatsinks, it's better to use a resistive heating
element instead of the CPU. You can't control how much heat the CPU is putting
out (what with automatic frequency scaling and whatnot), but you can control
how much current you are pumping through a resistor. Dan's Data has an article
about this:

<http://www.dansdata.com/coolercomp.htm>

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Retric
Residence increases as temperature increases, so better heat dissipation can
dramatically reduce temperatures. Also if your heat sink is not working you
have less than 5 seconds until this chip fries or shuts down to save it's
self. So if the system boots then the heat sink really is working.

PS: Diamond is an great thermal conductor.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity>) W/(m·K) Copper = 401,
Silver = 429, Diamond = 900+

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ajross
I don't believe those temperature measurements for a second. Having a better-
than-metal thermal conductivity is all well and good through the 0.1mm or so
of grease, but the surfaces on either side of that are _themselves metal_ ,
and much, much thicker than the grease layer. This is a misoptimization. It's
the equivalent of tuning code that your application spends 1% of its time in.
Who cares?

The purpose of thermal grease is to displace _air_ , not to be better than the
metal heat transfer parts.

~~~
Retric
I don't think silicone grease is anywhere as conductive as copper. While the 2
to 5 x increase in conductivity from using diamond is still fighting the
bonding agent, it's probably helping more than you might expect.

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rawr
Oh man, your wife is going to be _pissed_ when she finds out you disintegrated
her engagement ring for your little computer machine.

