Any recommended thermal epoxy?

[evilkitty]

What is something that is decent for gluing a heat sink to a IC's package (vram chip in this case)

by decent i mean a good price/performance ratio, not extremely expensive or horrible performance

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

What is something that is decent for gluing a heat sink to a IC's package (vram chip in this case)

by decent i mean a good price/performance ratio, not extremely expensive or horrible performance

This is a good question I am interested in the possible answers to this question myself

[diif]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

You don't want to use epoxy, you want something with some flex.
Something like this https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004966102870.html or a piece of the double sided thermal tape used on LED strips.

[stj]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

thermal tape is shit,
the metal/ceramic loaded rtv from Tian-Mu is good though.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

thermal tape is pretty much the standard method of attaching ramsinks to vram. i use 3m 8810, 8815 or 9448A thermal tape. sticks well and doesnt fall off. the secret to getting thermal tape to stick well is to make sure the surface is clean and free from oil or other residue like dust. articlean or ronsonol/zippo lighter fluid then ipa to clean the die and heatsink surface before attaching the tape works wonders.

i think epoxy may crack the die due to flex issues like diff said.

[stj]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

zinc loaded epoxy is very expensive - but it doesnt crack
the problem with the tape is poor thermal transfer.
there was a vid on YT years ago where they compared various tapes, glues and squishy pads.

[evilkitty]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234485591632

is this stuff any good?

looking for something i can get is less than 2 weeks (preferably less than 1)

[momaka]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

thermal tape is pretty much the standard method of attaching ramsinks to vram. i use 3m 8810, 8815 or 9448A thermal tape. sticks well and doesnt fall off. the secret to getting thermal tape to stick well is to make sure the surface is clean and free from oil or other residue like dust. articlean or ronsonol/zippo lighter fluid then ipa to clean the die and heatsink surface before attaching the tape works wonders.

i think epoxy may crack the die due to flex issues like diff said.

^ What he said.

the problem with the tape is poor thermal transfer.
there was a vid on YT years ago where they compared various tapes, glues and squishy pads.

Yes, but VRAM chips have pretty low thermal output, so even a relatively "high" thermal resistance of thermal tape is good enough. After all, the epoxy casing on VRAMs, MOSFETs, and similar ICs is not great at conducting heat as well. In fact, most of the cooling on RAM chips is through their BGA to the PCB underneath. Of course, if the PCB doesn't have enough surface area, then that's when add-on heatsinks become helpful or necessary.

BTW, I have some Arctic Silver thermal epoxy, and that stuff goes hard as a rock once it dries. I picked up a laptop on Craigslist a few years back, where the owner used this stuff on the CPU heatsink and you cannot separate the two off - not even with a big screwdriver prying between the two. I think some Radeon 7500 and 9000 video cards also used this or something similar, because I cannot separate the heatsinks on those from the GPU chips. There are no mounting/securing pins on those heatsinks, so I'm not surprised ATI did that. Still, it sucks once the fan fails, as the 40 mm fan was custom-made for the heatsink.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234485591632

is this stuff any good?

looking for something i can get is less than 2 weeks (preferably less than 1)

No idea, but I always wondered myself. It's a "one part" glue, so I wonder how strong it would be. In contrast, the Arctic thermal epoxy is a two-part mix like a real epoxy (well, it is a real epoxy, AFAIK) and holds like one too.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

Cyanoacrylate glues are 1-part ... so who knows...?

[stj]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

cyanocrylate evaporates onto everything including your eyes when it gets hot - dont use it.

the heatsink bandage or whatever they are calling it is usually RTV with ceramic powder suspended in it to increase the thermal transfer.
i use that type of stuff on flashlights to mount the led "star" to the aluminium body

[evilkitty]

Re: Any recommended thermal epoxy?

The tube of stuff that came with my arctic mono plus was a single tube and the stuff is white, there was no branding on the tube itself

if you get the stuff a bit below freezing you can USUALLY break it off without ripping ICs off the PCB, dried stripes if you scrape them off are flexible

maybe this is the same stuff? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072MSXHJD