Best way to apply Artic Thermal 2 Goop?

[richklein]

Hi,

I have a XP1700 & an XP1900 both on Asus AVA266-E mobos. The 1700 came with some sort of "tab" instead of goop & the 1900 came with goop & no tab.

Anyway, I am going to swap fans for Volcano7's & would like to know the best way to remove the current goop & to apply the new goop.

Both machines have been up for about 2 weeks. So maybe the thermal tab melted away? Anyway, I am looking for the safest way to remove the "stock Stuff".

Thanks,
Rich

[Placid]

Clean the mating surfaces completely with a low residual solvent (High-purity isopropyl alcohol or acetone will work) and a LINT FREE cloth. (i.e. lens cleaning cloth) If another thermal compound has previously been applied to the heatsink, the mounting surface should be thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned with a xylene based cleaner, (Goof Off and some carburetor cleaners) acetone, MEK, mineral spirits, or 99% pure isopropyl alcohol. It is important to keep the surfaces free of foreign materials and NOT to touch the surfaces (a hair, piece of lint, and even dead skin cells can significantly affect the thermal interfaces performance, especially on modern small core CPUs as the surface area is already severely limited). In addition, oils from your fingers can adversely affect the performance by preventing the micronized silver fill from directly contacting the metal surface. (Fingerprints can be as thick as 0.005")

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm

[Christoph]

You shouldn't have used the CPUs with the thermal pads, but that doesn't help you any in your current situation. The best possible thing you could do (this requires balls of steel) would be to scrape the wax off the CPU die and the HSFs and then lap both (although I don't recommend lapping the die, since one stroke too many means death to your chip). You should lap the bottoms of the HSFs because the wax gets into the microscopic crevices and interferes with the heat transfer of any other thermal goop you put in later.
If you haven't bought any AS2 yet, you might want to wit until AS3 is released, but if you're impatient, AS2 is more than adequate.