Potential prob. w/Arctic Silver

[Matthew A.]

Being as the pins on Intel's 1.7G Northwood cpu's are very near the edge of the chip, what is the possibility of creating a short between two or more pins should a small amount of Arctic Silver manage to work it's way under the chip. I noticed that it would be very easy for Arctic Silver to come into contact due to the lack of overhang of the chip itself.

[The Overclocker]

if the correct applicaton and the right ammount of artic silver is used then there will not be a problem

[Vinny]

LIES, HE WORKS FOR AC. HE IS FULLED WITH POSION DON"T BLIEVE HIM. AHHHHHHH

[oc jason]

actually AS in itself is not conductive so i dont think itll matter

[joatam316]

Matthew, you have nothing to worry about, Artic silver is almost never electric conductive. There is only one time were Artic Silver can conduct electricity but i don't remember. It is either when applied too thick or too thin. To get the right answer go Here (http://www.articsilver.com/)

Hope this helps :D

[Vinny]

They say this on site

"Caution:
We do not recommend using Arctic Silver II on Intel Xeon processors. The huge contact area and large gaps between the processor and the heatsink require a thermal pad or thick mesh-reinforced paste."

So i dont think that you should use. I would just trade the 2c and go with a 100% non conductive compound. They sell it in radio shack.

[Colin]

I would use the Arctic Silver. There will more than a 2C difference between Arctic Silver and Radio Shack goop. Check out this review (http://209.120.143.253/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=8) of Arctic Silver 3 done with a P4 internal diode.

[Matthew A.]

Thanks for the input people. I had always assumed that Arctic Silver contained actual silver hince the name. Though I guess even if it does contain silver, if one were to look at a glob of the stuff under a scanning electron microscope one would probably see large gaps between groups of silver molecules. Enough to prevent electrical conductivity at normal voltages. All I know runs hot (51 degrees as I speak) w/oem HSF. seems to be it's idle temp w/AS. Temperature before AS was a good 4 degrees higher.

[GoldenTiger]

If you're really paranoid, get some Arctic Alumina. AS is fine for processors, though. Personally I'll be using Alumina on my GPU, GPU RAM, System RAM, etc. just in case I make a mistake over that huge amount of stuff :). I'm using AS on my CPU always, though :D! AS is made mostly of silver, with other stuff in it to prevent conductivity.

[Neco]

While its not gonna fry the chip or anything like that.. it COULD render it useless.

anyone remember those "dead" video cards some people got sometimes when they did a sloppy AS application ? Sure they'd work again if you wer elucky enough to get them cleaned up.


I've never seen a Northwood or anything tho so I can't comment on the possibility of that happening.

[The Overclocker]

then forget the artic silver and go for artic alumina which is 100% non conductive