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DIY CPU Thermal Grease, Using Diamond Dust
tygerstripes writes "The dysfunctor has spotted an impressive project over on InventGeek.com; an innovative chap has developed his own thermal compound for improved CPU cooling, using diamond dust — the best available material for thermal conduction — as the key ingredient. In spite of the quick-&-dirty DIY nature of the project, the gains in cooling performance are remarkable, especially considering the material cost was only $33. Given the price many enthusiasts will pay for a top-end cooler, it's easy to imagine this product coming to market quite soon."
57C, while this diamond dust compound achieved 38C.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, this sounds like something that needs to be reproduced because it sounds too good to be true man... Did it say that in TFA?
runs off to read TFA for the first time in his life...
I call shenanigans.
The thermal conductivity of Arctic Silver and this stuff couldn't be so great that a layer as thin as the crack-filler between a chip lid and a cooling-fin plate would amount to a 19C difference in temperature.
I want to see independent reproduction of the experiment.
Either it's totally bogus, or something was not installed correctly in one of the two setups. The heat sink on the 57C, or the thermometer on the 38C.
I was watching, I think, Nova Science Now. There was a segment about artificial diamonds, and a researcher had the host hold a penny up to a cube of ice, and then a chunk of diamond up to the ice. With the penny, he waited a second and said "I feel the cold." With the diamond, he instantly said "Hey, the ice is melting."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'm sorry, but the gains he is talking about are simply unrealistic. Lets do a little math shall we?
.75 inches (it will be larger), his CPU is disapating 100 Watts(probably higher than it is), and we take the advertised number for AS5 at 8 W/m*K, and you end up with a thermal circuit that takes 13 degrees to cross.
If we take a rather thick installation of AS5 at 0.015 inches and assume the contact area is a square with sides of
He claims to have a new thermal compound which reduces the temperature by 14 degrees. Now lets take a look at some more realistic numbers... 1 sq in area, 75 watts, 0.010in thick paste, same 8W/m*K and you get a tempeture delta of 4 degrees to cross.
Furthermore, when we start looking at websites that have done reviews of thermal pastes like [url=http://hardwarelogic.com/news/137/ARTICLE/2752/3/2008-03-03.html]IC Diamond 7 Carat[/url] and they show a range of 1-2 degrees difference between AS5 and the paste it makes it hard to belive.
For a little more background, perhaps we should consider what is going on here. We have some material that is being used for thermal conduction, silver or diamonds, and to that we are have a material it is being suspended into. Thermal conductivity of silver is over 400 W/m*K and artic silver which is made from pure silver plus the suspension yields a conductivity of 8 w/m*K. The idea that exchanging that for something with a thermal conductivity of somewhere between 900 and 2000W/m*K is going to yield a paste with orders of magnitude better thermal conductivity.
So based on that, I'd like to call shens. If he made a mistake with his numbers or he faked them I don't know, all I know is the numbers he is reporting are outside the realm of reality.