cheap but good thermal paste?

[Danghaibang]

I'm using DowSil TC-5888 with a very detailed analysis from https://www.igorslab.de/en/the-world...ve-fact-check/

[eccerr0r]

Running my E5 full bore... it's doing Gentoo updates as well as taking compile jobs from other machines that are also doing updates,,,

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +47.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 0: +42.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 1: +42.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 2: +46.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 3: +42.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 4: +43.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 8: +46.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 9: +44.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 10: +45.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 11: +43.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
Core 12: +44.0°C (high = +81.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)

(note these are logical core numbers so they're not in order as the virtual ht cores aren't displayed here.)

probably safe even with the reused heat sink paste...

[eccerr0r]

Cheap.

I'll deal with the form factor

(been meaning to build one with a microcontroller but getting isolation right is being annoying...)

[stj]

power meter? a mountable one or a portable like big clive uses?

[sam_sam_sam]

I need to find another power meter...been using my kill-a-watt to measure solar power production...even if it gives me the wrong sign...

I need to find a power meter myself as well ( my problem is I do not know what kind of specifications to look for when buying one it does not need to extremely accurate but it needs to decently accurate would work for me ) I also have a kill-a-watt which I use occasionally when I want to know the wattage of something plus how long it takes to get to one kilowatt of power used I know that it is an estimate of power usage and for most things that is good for me

[eccerr0r]

I need to find a way to measure power consumption of the cpu vs gpu (using a "budget" single slot low profile gpu)... and I never measured the power of the i7-3820 before I removed it so I guess I'll never know.

The idle power of the e5-2690v2 system is a bit more than the i7-2700k system however...about 18% (both having AMD GPUs in them)... when loaded down it's 33% more. Granted with more cores, 33% more power and 2x+ computation bandwidth, probably an acceptable tradeoff. Temperatures seemed to stable around 60°C when loaded so I guess this is okay.

I need to find another power meter...been using my kill-a-watt to measure solar power production...even if it gives me the wrong sign...

[momaka]

so whats wrong with good old MX4? carbon based so cheap if your smart and get the 45gram tube and not the tiny 4gram one.
just be carefull on high-voltage parts - it probably has capacitive coupling properties.

It does indeed... or perhaps it's very slightly conductive? Either way, I found out the hard way - replaced the HOT on a CRT monitor and added a tiny bit of MX-4 to both sides of the old silicone pad (so little that none pushed out from the sides), thinking it would help the transistor run cooler. Upon power up, I heard and smelled arcing and the CRT didn't turn on. I thought the HOT had shorted again, but nope - the MX-4 compound that got too close to the transistor screw arced over and created a conductive carbon path. Transistor itself survived and was fine.
So lesson learned there.

Ugh. Cheaped out here: I replaced a i7-3820 with a e5-2690v2 by carefully scraping off the old heatsink compound and applying it to the "new" cpu...

LOL, I'm guilty of doing that all the time to my own PCs. So long as the old compound is not dry and full of hard debris (i.e. sand, concrete dust, and etc.) to make the heatsink seat unevenly, it can be re-used many times over... at least for older (and not so sensitive) CPUs. With modern CPUs hitting power dissipation of over 150W regularly and due to not having soldered IHS's, the cooling will probably suffer. In my case, I was testing an old socket 775 mobo with and AGP slot, and my test CPU for it was a Pentium 4 630. I just smudged some leftover used compound that I had already swapped over 5 times between various other coolers and CPU's. At least for the brief testing I did in BIOS, the temperatures were OK (well, for a Pentium 4 anyways )

...though I wonder the real power dissipation difference between the two CPUs.

I do that (er, rather *did*, now that I'm in EU-land) with Kill-a-Watt meter. If rest of the system is the same, you should be able to see the difference (if there is any).

look them up at cpu-world.
a very handy site!

Indeed.
That being said, I almost always get an error on that site now when I try to look up info on many older CPUs - says the current page is down due to "ongoing content scraping", or something along those lines. Does anyone else get that error too?

Yeah, take a look. They're both rated the same TDP but this is meaningless in real world application (without the s)...

Yeah, that's Intel's TDP "information" for ya anymore. (And has been going on for quite a while like this.)
It's a measure of some average/"nominal" power dissipation under some average/"normal" CPU loads, whatever these two figures may be or mean (anyone at Intel care to shed a light on this subject here? ) Either way, it's not the absolute maximum rated TDP of the CPU. More like a PMPO rating for speakers, but kinda in reverse.

And with modern "60-ish" Watts TDP -rated CPUs peaking in the 150W range (or higher) in turbo mode, it really is a meaningless figure anymore.

[Aliencomputres]

Céramique 2 does not contain any metal or other electrically conductive materials. It is a pure electrical insulator, neither electrically conductive nor capacitive.

25-gram syringe. (Approximately 9.2cc)
At a layer 0.003" thick, one syringe will cover about 200 square inches.

[Aliencomputres]

so whats wrong with good old MX4? carbon based so cheap if your smart and get the 45gram tube and not the tiny 4gram one.
just be carefull on high-voltage parts - it probably has capacitive coupling properties.

Céramique 2 does not contain any metal or other electrically conductive materials. It is a pure electrical insulator, neither electrically conductive nor capacitive.

[eccerr0r]

Yeah, take a look. They're both rated the same TDP but this is meaningless in real world application (without the s)...

[stj]

look them up at cpu-world.
a very handy site!

[eccerr0r]

Ugh. Cheaped out here: I replaced a i7-3820 with a e5-2690v2 by carefully scraping off the old heatsink compound and applying it to the "new" cpu...

The old heat sink compound is gray colored.

So far so good, it survived Gentoo building...though I wonder the real power dissipation difference between the two CPUs.

[stj]

so whats wrong with good old MX4? carbon based so cheap if your smart and get the 45gram tube and not the tiny 4gram one.
just be carefull on high-voltage parts - it probably has capacitive coupling properties.

[Aliencomputres]

No silver. They discontinued Ceramique 1, and here we have 2. More zinc oxide, some aluminum oxide and boron nitride. Same as usual ingredients, different proportions.
Arctic Silver Inc. is using Polyol Ester as a base, somer Polyether Glycol to make it fluid.

Read and see what ai wrote!

[redwire]

No silver. They discontinued Ceramique 1, and here we have 2. More zinc oxide, some aluminum oxide and boron nitride. Same as usual ingredients, different proportions.
Arctic Silver Inc. is using Polyol Ester as a base, somer Polyether Glycol to make it fluid.

[Aliencomputres]

Arctic Silver Ceramique 2

[kity92]

Re: cheap but good thermal paste?

I think there is no price performance thermal paste. Of course I'm not meaning expensive pastes are better but If you will purchase 3-4$ thermal paste these are not giving anything.

[suho0306]

Re: cheap but good thermal paste?

If you are looking for a low-cost, high-performance thermal paste, the zf-12 is recommended.
However, due to its low viscosity, it has a short lifespan and is difficult to apply.

[bord]

Re: cheap but good thermal paste?

................
White thermal compound is usually (cheap) ZnO and silicone grease. On the other hand, I still don't know what's in the gray heatsink pastes no matter what the manufacturer was. Would be interesting to see what's in this stuff - I suspect silicone grease is still the main carrier no matter what thermal compound we're talking about (other than the "liquid metal" ones) ... but the stuff mixed in seems to be some military guarded secret...

I highly doubt silver is used that much, which caused the initial hesitancy on buying new thermal compound as it would add significantly to the cost. Now that I find there are other grayish heatsink compound that's much cheaper than AS5 there must be something that can get better than ZnO without any silver.

The grey stuff is carbon particles which is common in pastes. I don't bother about the contents, its not really important anymore.

AS5 is old and surpassed by many newer even cheap pastes out there like MX4, and its more difficult to spread and capacitative. But it has an advantage in that it does not 'pump out' as much due to its higher viscosity.

Pump out is a big problem especially for bare die cpus, gpus, laptops and to a lesser extent current cpus which have a higher heat density. Popular pastes like MX/NT-H1 are reported to have noticeably decreased cooling performance due to pump out, sometimes within a matter of weeks. Some of the old stuff like AS5, Ceramique, possibly the MX-2 seemed to be doing better in terms of durability.

The newer pastes like CM Maker Nano, NT-H2, Hydronaut, MX-5 are all more viscous to reduce the pump out effect. On the budget side, I'd look at the MX-2/MX-4, or Chinese made HY-810/880, GD900/900-1, they are made by Halnziye, Foshan HC.

[h0baz]

Re: cheap but good thermal paste?

artic sliver is also good