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The Thermal Paste Revolution
arhines writes "ZZZ is running an article about an interesting new thermal paste which surpasses even solder in thermal conductance by 33 percent. If this paste makes it to the market sometime soon, we'll all surely be thinking about putting it in our boxes. In fact, if use of the paste becomes commonplace, it may even give the semiconductor industry a little speed boost."
" Lots of OEM or low end cooling setups use either a thermal interface pad (TIM) or that white goop you get at radio shack. The fact is that neither of those does a great job of transferring heat from the processor to the heatsink. While they work ok, they don't exactly assist Moore's law in fulfilling itself by limiting clock speeds with heat." Actually, that's hardly true at all. RS's compound has been found to be one of the best out there. Just take a look at some reviews that include it.
I got a +5, Troll
Maybe this stuff can be put in all those crappy DSL modems and routers that freeze up due to overheating. It would be easier than modding the whole damn thing to pieces with fans and whatnot...
They seem to have just duplicated the inventor's press release - the article doesn't contain any independent evaluation of the substance whatsoever.
of 0.004% that thermal paste actually makes a difference
bite my glorious golden ass.
I think you misunderstood the statement. They may have compared the thermal conductance of this material to solder, but they're not looking to replace solder. Solder is made up of metals, so it's naturally a good conductor. But metal doesn't spread very well over microscopic cracks -- and no, you can't fill in the cracks with solder, because the metal will contract when it cools and be useless as a thermal paste. You wouldn't want to use a thermal paste as a solder, because thermal paste typically takes a very, very long time to dry when not exposed (ie: between a cpu and a heatsink).
So it looks like CowboyNeal is saying if this new thermal paste can improve the effectiveness of a heatsink (and fan) by a reasonable amount, manufacturers will be able to push their clock speeds a little higher.
Thought about doing the same to the RIAA, but I'd need a whole tanker truck load at least there.
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The Thermal Paste Revolution
Oh you bet, it will be like 'before and after', a marking point in history. As in; I remember back in the days, before the revolution.
Remember these days people, its one of those great turning points in history and you are part of it.
according to the article you dont see the 33% improvement until you apply about twice the normal pressure. imagine the cracked cores
bite my glorious golden ass.
You know, that's just perfect. Just yesterday I was looking at my Power Macintosh G4 and saying "You know, if there's one thing this computer's missing, it's paste. If only there were some way I could just take paste and smear it all over the inside of this computer."
And now here we are!
It's been true for some time that the thermal junction between the top of the chip and the heatsink isn't nearly as important as the internal heat disipation (sp?) of the chip. While a modern chip with a decent heatsink can feel merely warm to the touch the internal gate temperature can be aproaching bounderies where the thermal stress is actually damaging gates. This is one of several barriers keeping 3D memory chips from becoming reality (the other major one is cost of manufacturing a working chip of multiple layers, but even pie in the sky lab samples have problems because of heat disipation from the core of the stack.)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Have a look at the instructions for Arctic Silver 3 to see what kind of steps are needed.
Working in a test lab for PCs I encountered one problem with heat conducting paste: Since Intel introduced the mPGA 478 housing for their CPUs the ZIF socket on the mainboard is much smaller than the heatsink above. That means, if the paste between processor and heatsink is too much adhesive it is like the processor is glued to the heatsink and every time you remove the heatsink (e.g. for changing the CPU) you pull out the processor from a closed ZIF socket! Ok, so far the processors survived but I don't think that this is nice anyway.
I have a tube of Arctic Silver 2 (yeah, I'm like two generations behind) but I'm not sure that I really needed it. This dude tried out several non-conventional thermal transfer compounds, including vegemite.(!) When properly applied, there wasn't a huge difference between them. In fact, in the (extremely specific) conditions, the vegemite and toothpaste outperformed the Arctic Silver! (Obviously, you should read the article for details.)
The article's point isn't that you should be using toothpaste; rather, it's that make sure you properly apply whatever thermal compound you do use, and don't expect miracles. No matter how effective your thermal transfer, you've still got to dump the heat somewhere. If you're running close to the edge of thermal failure, there are almost certainly other, much more effective cooling solutions. This new paste is probably a good thing, but don't expect miracles.
Of course we should not forget that Using thermal grease on your Athlon will void your warranty.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Only on Slashdot would you ever see the words "interesting" and "thermal paste" used together.
The article on thermal paste is quite interesting, such advances are sure to aid in the cooling levels for the near future. However, I often wonder why there hasn't been much development in the way of devising viable (read: cheap) alternative cooling solutions (e.g water/fliud, air piping, effective passive cooling). It seems that the now archaic heatsink/fan just isn't cutting it anymore, at least down to a bearable level that is (the amount of noise my cpu fan creates is ridiculous).
Part of this is the chip maker's fault, for running the chip too hot/fast. Likewise, part of the fault rests on the case/fan manufacturers, as the cases become increasingly smaller, dealing with cooling becomes harder, as there is less space to work in.
It is getting to the point where I feel that my peace of mind with regards to noise is well worth the sacrifice of speed. After all, I don't need the full power of my cpu most of the time, just when compiling/rendering/encoding. The cpu just isn't the bottleneck anymore, and it's useless to continue in this speed race, not until the other system components catch up. Why doesn't the industry work together to create a better solution? It's high time I'm rid of the constant roar of these machines.
This seems a very odd comparison to me; when was the last time you soldered a heatsink to a hot component or used paste to assemble a circuit board? The use in chips seems a little suspect too..
:-)
I can just see the warnings now. "Do not mount vertically or internal circuits will drip out!!!"
Technologies like this are complementary to each other.
As someone previously pointed out, one of the major problems facing device manufacturers is transferring the heat out of the die. When improvements are made in this area, then the problem will still be transferring the heat away from the die where it can be dissipated by however (water cooled slug, air cooled sink, etc. etc.) once the heat can be effectively moved away from the die-face at 99.999% efficiency there's still the issue of radiating the heat away from the assembly altogether. Then there is still the ambient air temp (have you priced out a redundant 10+ ton HVAC system for a datacenter lately?)...
It's all a catch 22 but anytime a significant improvement is made in one of these areas is leads to higher performance and lower costs (tolerances can come down or stay at the same level for a bit while increasing performance), which by themselves may seem minor, but when they are all taken together make a significant improvement.
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* who runs within 2 degrees of max temp for their CPU? some crazy overclockers, but it's not exactly reliable practice, is it? if it was 10 degrees, maybe but it's not going to make that much difference
* stop knocking the thermal pads. retail CPUs use these because joe sixpack can't f*vck it up and claim on their warranty. if you don't like it, scrape it off and stick a blob of arctic silver or similar
* bear in mind AMDs warranty only applies if you use approved thermal solutions
This may help solve the problem that thermal compound applied badly is worse (in terms of temperature) than none at all.
In a thermal compound we are seeking somethng that:
(1) will conduct heat to the heatsink better than air
(2) will remain inert under extended high temperature exposure
(3) is non toxic (nice seeing as we have to deal with the stuff)
It is difficult for a material to conduct heat better than air if (large or many) air bubbles are present between the two surfaces, trapped by the compound itself.
So we all know how silicone performs, it meets 2 and 3 but there are some issues with 1, mainly because of the air bubble issue.
Carbon black, polyehtylene glycol and ethyl cellulose are both non-hazardous and ethyl cellulose is only mildly hazardous (Material Safety Data Sheets www.merck.co.th, criterion 3 met)
Particulate size is small (should lick the air bubble problem).
Spreadability should be a-ok (ethyl cellulose is a molding compound.
No polymerisation or other chemical reaction should occur (stable mixture, criterion 2 met).
Carbon is a brilliant conductor in this form ( criterion 1 met)
I think it'll work
About 10 years ago I was working on a product that used 200 Amp IGBT's for a traction drive. I spent about a month researching the thermal circuits used to cool these devices.
The conclusion: The best thermal contact is metal to metal. The best way of acheiving this is by "lapping" the contact area's together with a fine abrasive. Once your have done this the application of a minute amount of thermal grease improves conductivity by less than 0.5%. We also discovered that applying more than a fine film or grease significantly decreased the conductivity (10% or more).
Lay off the grease!
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It would be a breakthrough for heat dissipating sexual lubricants.
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It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You know, I don't WANT another cooling method... I don't want processor makers to be able to squeeze another few MHz out of their processors for one simple reason... They run too damn hot already!
I say this for two important reasons:
#1. More heat happens to mean that much more power is being wasted. Here in CA, electricity is expensive, and my electric bill doubled when I hooked-up my new system. Now I'm paying more for the electricity to keep my computer running 24/7 (yes, it needs to be running) than I am for my 1.5M/768kbps DSL... That's just so very wrong.
#2. I live in a big damn desert... That means temperatures are regularly very close to 130F degrees... It seems like 9 months out of the year temperatures are above 100F, and keeping a system cool when temperatures are that high is not easy. I've been forced to install a swamp cooler near my computers, and although that does a good job of cooling, it is louder than the most annoying computer fan you've ever heard, so it's not a plesant solution. Don't talk to me about water cooling/heat pipes becasue they only conduct the heat out of the computer, leaving it to heat up the building. Don't talk about sucking the heat outdoors, because it's so hot outdoors that the computers would be overheating in no time.
Personally, I would love to be using a fast PPC machine, but the price is just prohibitive... I'd have to be using my current Athlon XP 2000 for years before the electric bill would ammount to the inital price of an equivalently fast PPC system, and that wouldn't be taking into account that the PPC system would still be using up 1/4-1/2 the same ammount of electricity.
Frankly, I would like to see Laptop computer processors in desktop systems. That would be a decent compromise, that would keep things cool, without having something that is incredibly slow (eg. Via C3).
(Oh yeah, and: #3. Global warming crap, blah blah blah.)
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Thermal pastes are thermally conductive, not electrically so. In fact, you want them to be a damned good electrical insulator. If you'd read the article (I did several days ago- [H]ardOCP had coverage of this one earlier this week...) you'd have found out that carbon black, the substance in question, outpaces pretty much everything else (including diamond and nanotube based compounds in development) because it fills the gaps between the heatsink and the chip's heat spreader, etc. with thermally conductive materials better than anything else.
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