How to make thermal paste?

[iKingRPG]

Just curious

[DarIin]

You just mix toothepaste with silver food dye.

[191x7]

2 minutes ago, DarIin said:

You just mix toothepaste with silver food dye.

And mayonnaise. Also, if there's no silver food dye some silver nail polish will do.

[mariushm]

You don't, too difficult.

 

but if you insist see google patents :

 

https://patents.google.com/?q=thermal&q=grease&oq=thermal+grease

https://patents.google.com/?q=thermal&q=paste&oq=thermal+paste

https://patents.google.com/?q=thermal&q=compound&oq=thermal+compound

 

You can also pick your preferred paste and google in combination with MSDS ex arctic ceramique msds  ... a google search would give you http://www.arcticsilver.com/msds.htm

where u find http://www.arcticsilver.com/PDF/CMQ2_SDS.pdf

 

 

boron nitride is toxic by itself if eaten and good luck making super tiny particles of aluminum oxide (since it oxidizes in air)

and you still need the "oil" in which these 3 elements are suspended and which makes the paste, a paste.

[emosun]

I just use cake frosting with steel wool fragments

[Arika]

it's like $7 a tube.....

[benny_r_t_2]

I thought Luke or Linus made a video long time ago about using toothpaste.  I couldn't find it though.  Maybe it was NCIX who made the vid.    I think they tried other things too like mayonnaise.  I'm looking forward though to seeing Rileys upcoming video on the subject.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

3 minutes ago, benny_r_t_2 said:

I couldn't find it though.  Maybe it was NCIX who made the vid.    I think they tried other things too like mayonnaise. 

pretty sure jayz two cents made one on this, the worst was oreo.

therefore do not but oreo.

27 minutes ago, mariushm said:

making super tiny particles of aluminum oxide (since it oxidizes in air)

what does Al2O3 do here? I have no clue, just as good conductor powder? 

[mariushm]

You can use anything that's fine grained enough to get into the imperfections of the two metals (heatsink and cpu top)

A lot of materials conduct heat better than plain air which is actually an insulator (think windows made out of two glass sheets with air in middle)

Problem is when those materials dry or start burning due to sustained heat and gradually lose conductivity (become insulators or conduct heat really  poorly

thermal pastes and greases use oils and liquids to suspend the conductive materials (see above for example mat.)  that can last  loads of heating-cooling cycles

[mariushm]

5 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

 

what does Al2O3 do here? I have no clue, just as good conductor powder? 

It's electrical insulator, good conductivity, i think heavier than the other so it can give paste a more "paste", chunky, more "premium" feeling (compared with silicon grease and others)

probably helps to keep the other "active" ingredients mixed and reduce separation over time (sitting on shelves etc)

[NineEyeRon]

Recipie for Thermal Paste:

 

Preheat your computer to 55C. Take $6 and combine it with one shopping website, must sell tech gear, wait 3-4 days for shipping.

[ArduinoBen]

Back when I was using a really shitty ThinkPad which was falling apart, my stupid ass took off the heat sink to look at the CPU without realizing I would need to put on more thermal paste, after a few weeks of thermal shutdowns every so often I realized this but didn't want to spend money on that piece of junk, so I made homemade thermal paste.  Throughout my time with that laptop, I made around three different batches of my homemade thermal paste, the final and best mixture was half Vaseline and half toothpaste.  This worked good enough, but if your components or device means anything to you, go ahead and buy yourself some thermal paste, I'm currently using Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut, but you can do just fine with some of the cheaper stuff such as Arctic MX5, using a real thermal compound will make a bigger difference than a fancy cooler would, and will be much healthier for your components which costing a fraction of the price.

[ArduinoBen]

46 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

pretty sure jayz two cents made one on this, the worst was oreo.

therefore do not but oreo.

what does Al2O3 do here? I have no clue, just as good conductor powder? 

I remember that video, the Oreo was disgusting, in fact, most of their dumb ideas (milk cooled PC) are really disgusting.

[Bananasplit_00]

Anyone remember the thread where a guy tested a load of stuff as thermal paste... 

[RejZoR]

Would be interesting to test how a piece of aluminium foil would work squeezed between CPU IHS and the CPU cooler. Got the idea when I remembered about the carbon pads Linus tested some time ago.

 

I mean, aluminium foil is super thin and soft, aluminium has reasonably good thermal conductivity, it should fill the micro gaps in the materials pretty well.

[RollinLower]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Would be interesting to test how a piece of aluminium foil would work squeezed between CPU IHS and the CPU cooler. Got the idea when I remembered about the carbon pads Linus tested some time ago.

 

I mean, aluminium foil is super thin and soft, aluminium has reasonably good thermal conductivity, it should fill the micro gaps in the materials pretty well.

i'd imagine metal foil is still too hard to be properly squeezed between the CPU and cooler. the mounting pressure could be damaging to your motherboard.

[mariushm]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Would be interesting to test how a piece of aluminium foil would work squeezed between CPU IHS and the CPU cooler. Got the idea when I remembered about the carbon pads Linus tested some time ago.

 

I mean, aluminium foil is super thin and soft, aluminium has reasonably good thermal conductivity, it should fill the micro gaps in the materials pretty well.

A thermal paste has to get inside the heatsink and push away the particles of air that would otherwise be stuck between heatsink and cpu, reducing heat transfer.

Aluminum foil would not compress or expand so it would not get inside microscopic holes in the metal of the heatsink and air would remain stuck there

Here's how you have to view heatsink (gray) and cpu (black) on a microscopic level :

 

If you place a blob of thermal paste in the center of the die, as you press down on the heatsink from above, the paste is pushed in all directions towards the outside of the cpu and goes inside those microscopic holes pushing particles of air out.

That's why it's not a good idea to spread the paste all over the cpu surface and then put down the heatsink, because the paste would act like a suction cup, trapping some air inside and making it hard for that air to be squeezed out.

 

If you place an aluminum foil, like i said, it behaves like a thermal paste that's already spread all over the cpu surface, the aluminum foil won't bend and won't shape itself to get inside these microcracks and air would remain trapped inside

 

You (and many other) are confused about thermal pads and thermal paste. Thermal pads are NOT designed to replace thermal pastes, compounds, whatever, they have different roles.

Thermal pads are not designed with a focus on filling microscopic gaps in heatsinks as thermal pastes work.  Sure, some pads are impregnated with some oils and are soft enough that they can somewhat be squeezed and make good contact but the primary role is not to behave as thermal pastes.

Pads are designed to transfer heat more in one direction than other, usually vertically, and they're designed to FILL BIGGER GAPS.

 

For example, you may have a gpu chip that's 3mm tall and some memory chips that are 1mm tall - cooling the memory chips is optional, not really needed but would be nice to have. At the same time, making a heatsink perfectly flat would be much cheaper than making the heatsink have curves, so that's where thermal pads come in:

 

ugly ms paint picture to show what i mean :

 

 

Sure there are some new materials like those graphite pads which which can actually have better thermal conductivity than thermal pastes, and that's why those pads sometimes can be better - it's not because they fill those microscropic holes but it may be because they actually move the heat between the two metals better than the thermal pastes - especially if the thermal paste is applied in a thick layer between the metals.

[RejZoR]

I might actually try this myself and compare it to CoolerMaster Maker Nano paste...

[cluelessgenius]

6 hours ago, iKingRPG said:

Just curious

just wait. james is preparing a video on it.