All Linux Things

Most of my hardware uses standard thermal paste, not LM or Arctic Silver for instance. The future of thermal paste in fact isnt thermal paste but graphene(carbon nanotunes in what appears to be a fabric square you lay on the cpu and attach the heatsink. They dont dry up, they dont move like LM and offer a long term/high performing solution to the various paste versions. Its called Thermal Grizzly Kryosheets, designed by a well known engineer, who regularly posts on Youtube named derbauer. Gamers Nexus though has done the best study of thermal paste Ive ever seen and are recognized as one of the best technical sites on Youtube.
Back to LM, there is no doubt it offers an amazing ability to cool cpus/gpus but my issue is, that you have many other components in a laptop that dont get the attention nor the level of cooling the cpu gets. It leads to much higher component failure rates since the advent of ultra thin hardware. As I mentioned before on Youtube, Northridgefix a well known repair shop has seen a huge amount of these issues in laptops and the fact that something has to give. If you havent had an issue thats great but the chances are you will and sooner than you think.
Ill be curious to see as we move into the ARM era whether that has a good impact on how hot and reliable thin systems will become.

I have a couple of different thermal compounds and they give different results and so the lesser used ones are not so good and I only really use them when playing with some peltier modules I bought out of curiosity.

Ive used pretty much everything up to this point including Peltiers, AIO/water coolers and a variety of thermal paste and pads. So much depends of course on the hardware as laptops today and high end pcs are the worst case scenarios. Between various forms of coolers and thermal paste/pads its one of the biggest and most argued areas of tech. Its also the source of most hardware failures when cooling and lack of heatsinks doom various motherboard components.

crosscourt wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 9:46 pmIts also the source of most hardware failures when cooling and lack of heatsinks doom various motherboard components.

Amen to that!

Well just to close out this thread, I replaced the thermal paste this morning. It was a nightmare of a laptop to take apart and to get to where I needed to get just about the entire machine needed to be totally disassembled.

The main heat pipe are attached to the bottom of the aluminum pan that is the bottom case of the laptop. The CPU, GPU and one other chip are at the back and bottom of the motherboard. The entire area of the chips, heat pipes and fan are in their own sort of enclosure. It does clearly explain why the bottom of the laptop is always very warm and hot air blows up from the back of the case over the bottom of the screen. It is probably an efficient design for cooling, but it can be quite warm to hold and a real pain to work on.

The existing thermal paste would be better described as thermal dust, not need to scrub it off, just blow it off the pads. It is back together all screws accounted for and it booted first try with everything working. So that was a success. Overall the new paste seems to have dropped the temperatures about 10%, which is not as much as I expected, but I guess it means the repasting was not a failure.

Although there is much grumbling about new stuff being unrepairable, I do have to say that olds stuff is about as close to unrepairable as it can be. Getting to the bottom of the laptop was a big chore.

Thats more about the make of the laptop as my Dells its a piece of cake redoing the thermal paste. Newer laptops because of their case and overall design are a nightmare. If I were doing a laptop like that Id use one of the Kryosheet,s so I would know it would never degrade. Given your cpu has a thermal limit at 105C I doubt youll have any issues and even with the thermal dust you had, your cpu was running in the 70sC which is totally fine.

The newer unibody Macs are also very easy to work on. There is a limit to that, the latest Macs are all soldered components, so there is no opening to upgrade. However it is very easy to replace thermal paste, batteries, speaker assemblies, power management units and such in them.

Really hate modern Apple as they solder quite a few components including ssds in laptops and desktops.

I have never worked on a mac before (and really don't want to) but have seen quite a few Youtube videos of others doing the work and they are almost definitely the worst machines to take apart, if this was a mac you worked on you have done a great job getting it all done and the fact everything is working deserves praise indeed!

I have worked on many/most brands of laptop over the years and the majority are a breeze to disassemble/assemble but by design Apple do not want their products to even be opened yet alone repaired, "buy the latest model if that one is broken" would be the best advice from them.