thermal glue/sticky pads

Un4tural · June 2, 2015

So, I've got some copper heat sinks, as well as some scrap ones for ram small chipsets etc. i was thinking i could put them to use in my laptop as m500 msata ssd gets excessively hot, so does another chip on motherboard,

thus what i am looking for is thermal glue pads (i got coppers heat sinks set for raspberry pi) which seem to work quite nicely, however rather single use and while the pads work quite nicely once cleaning the goo off is an utter pain in the arse (acetone as alcohol or water doesn't get a reaction and even acetone takes a while).

Anyone have any recommendations for non permanent glue/double sided thermal tape or pads of some sort that wouldn't require extra fastening for the heat sinks and that would be possible to clean off?

ShadowCaptain · June 2, 2015

SNIP

Unless there is air flowing over the components adding a heat sink will not make much difference

what temps are you getting?

Un4tural · June 4, 2015

well it gets alright temps considering, for gpu and cpu, but chipset/ssd get quite hot, it's not as much for the no air flow cooling, it is for when i do gaming at home etc. with a cooling stand under it, i put a couple of those raspberry shivs on the ssd, drops temps from 80ish to 55c when it has the little fan moving air under it.

i need the pads/glue so i can put it on northbridge etc. as it does bsod/freeze occasionally, I'm suspecting from temperatures, sadly no sensor aida/speedfan anything picks up for chipset and those raspberry heat sinks that came with glue are slightly too tall so i need to use some different ones.

and as we all know, we need to brace ourselves, as summer is coming.

Circs · June 4, 2015

well it gets alright temps considering, for gpu and cpu, but chipset/ssd get quite hot, it's not as much for the no air flow cooling, it is for when i do gaming at home etc. with a cooling stand under it, i put a couple of those raspberry shivs on the ssd, drops temps from 80ish to 55c when it has the little fan moving air under it.

SSDs don't follow conventional wisdom regarding temperature vs life expectancy.

The above chart from Intel shows the relationship between temperature in Celsius and SSD data retention lifespan measured in weeks. Of note this chart is for drives that have already reached or exceeded their rated maximum lifetime writes, so for an Intel 730 240GB that's 91TB of host writes. (Your drive is rated for 72TB for all capacities.) A quick reading of the chart shows us that for maximum NAND longevity we actually want *higher* temperatures (to a point) while the drive is active, but lower temperatures while the drive is off.

Poking around into the Google machine we see that the M500 has a maximum rated operating temperature of 70c, so if that 80c number you're getting is from the SSD (I can't say for certain from your post) then we'll want to verify its accuracy. If you're actually seeing 80c then some variety of heatspreader on the offending chip(s) would be in order. Likely only the controller chip is seeing these elevated temperatures.

For the thermal tape you'll either want to use 3M 8810 or Akasa AK-TT12-80 if you don't want to use a more permanent thermal adhesive like Arctic Alumina's two part paste. (Despite the name it's actually nonconductive.)