Applying Thermal Grease...

Nice article, but as this relates to chips with an IHS, I'm curious... is the razor-blade/card method still the best for bare core chips (a la Athlon XP)?

benbaked said:

Nice article, but as this relates to chips with an IHS, I'm curious... is the razor-blade/card method still the best for bare core chips (a la Athlon XP)?

Click to expand...

You could always get a piece of glass and try it yourself - put some on, see how it spreads, if you get any bubbles etc.

Keep in mind, it isn't just about getting it spread over everything, thickness also has an impact. A couple pieces of glass will only tell you so much, in the end they don't have the same contact pressure, will bend a lot more than a chip or decent heatsink, and don't really tell you anything about thickness.

I'd be interesetd to see this same experement, on a cpu, with the results being the temperature.

matttheniceguy said:

Keep in mind, it isn't just about getting it spread over everything, thickness also has an impact. A couple pieces of glass will only tell you so much, in the end they don't have the same contact pressure, will bend a lot more than a chip or decent heatsink, and don't really tell you anything about thickness.

I'd be interesetd to see this same experement, on a cpu, with the results being the temperature.

Click to expand...

You can actually clamp the glass and get a fairly high pressure, then mic the thickness. It can clamp down as far as the average particle size in the grease, which is what you would see on a mounted sink.

For accelerated testing we have been clamping an IHS sized piece of copper to a glass plate then thermally treating it in an oven and observing how different compounds degrade with pressure and temperature with interesting results.