Silver 5 is NOT designed for laptops, original thermal grease works better?

I assembed a Dell E6500 by myself ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-e6500-m4400-mix-questions-about-hdd-ssd.html)

I just found one thing very interesting. Because the original thermal grease on the heatsink was messed up, I removed all thermal grease and applid Silver 5, which proven very good by my desktop. But right after I noticed the temperature of the laptop bottom is very high, not comfortable to use on my lap.

Normally when I am about to sleep, I put my laptop on bed then go to have a shower, organize things, then come back to use my laptop for a little while. After applied Silver 5, the laptop will heat itself to a very hot level when it's in bed. How hot it is? It's not comfortable to touch the bottom especially which the lap.

I did remember the orignal laptop was not hot when I got it. So I ordered dell's original thermal grease, and recieved it today. I replace Sliver 5 with the original dell grease. Now the laptop bottom gets cooler. And I put the laptop in bed as usual, it doesn't get uncomfortable hot anymore.

Isn't it wired?

 

The heat has to go somewhere if the TIM was sending it to the body of the laptop and now putting lesser performing TIM on there makes it not hot again it can only mean one thing.

Now the CPU/GPU is hot instead of the body of the laptop.

But this probably is not the case, it must have been something else making the computer hot like a process was hanging causing 100% cpu load, or fans not working properly and you got them working again on the 2nd install.

Its pretty much not possible for a better TIM to make things hotter or worse, it can only help.

 

One thing you seem to lack is solid evidence. Where are temperature program screenshots? Where is the substantial evidence that backs up what you are trying to say?

Arctic Silver 5 should be better than the stock paste. How do you know you pasted the laptop properly?

Maybe you should give a Shin Etsu product such as G751 or X23 a try, or maybe Innovation Cooling Diamond 7. I used ICD7 on the 5870M in my G73, and it reduced full load temperatures a whopping 19C.

EDIT: Also backing what Vicious said about heat distribution. The paste may have been doing a much better job of transferring the heat to the heatsink and body, which would make sense when tied to the fact there is no CPU or GPU diode readings.

 

The other thing I forgot to mention is that AS5 is not for novice use because its conductive. That is why its only mainly used for CPU and not GPU as if your not carefull with it, it can short out components.

Some kind of short could easily be the reason for your heat issues (again maybe sorting a fan jumper or something)

 

I applied S5 very carefully, I don't think short is the case.

I use hwmonitor to check the temperature. The temperature of ACPI, CPU, GPU are all in the range of 38-58C for both S5 and Dell original grease. There are no noticable change.

I know heat has to go somewhere, that's what I feel wired.

 

Did you wait for the burn-in period? Arctic Silver 5 is supposed to take about 200 hours to burn-in. Even so, I've generally felt that application is more important than the specific TIM, anyway, and AS5 is a bit on the old side as far as formulations go. Doesn't mean it's bad, just means that it's sort of the "old standard". If you're satisfied with the stock grease, there's no reason to change, but if you're really curious about which is better, I'd try reapplying both a few times before making any final judgements.

 

I used AF5(basically relabeled AS5) on an Asus G50 and it dropped the CPU temp by 9C.

 

You place your laptop on your bed???????

Few things are more stupid than that... you're letting the laptop swallow all the dust that will occur naturally, heck, I wouldn't be surprised if your temp problem comes from a clogged up fan - if it didn't clog up earlier then you were lucky.

 

Beds and couches are the biggest graveyards for laptops. Also, some people like to put a laptop in a plush case for transportation and then put the laptop on top of the case when they use it. Major fail at attempting to pamper the laptop.

 

Yes beds/couches are terrible for laptops.

I personally used some Cooler Master Thermal Fusion 400 on my laptop, removed the thermal grease. Did you use alcohol to remove the thermal paste? Did you also clean out the heatsink/fan when you did all that work?

Also what is your ambient room temperatures?

ANY CPU/GPU temperatures mean nothing without ambient room tempature. Period.

 

ICD7 is pretty darn good too. But yeah application of the paste is quite important. AS5 is pretty good, but definitely "older" tech. Shin Etsu is good but not quite as easy to get ahold of and is more expensive. I find ICD7 best bang for the buck if you're not going to be doing any significant overclocking.

 

I use the laptop on by bed but I use it over a thick(6mm) glass, I recommend you do the same.

About the temperatures I had to apply AS5 three times on my laptop(an Asus G51) until I did it right, on the first two times I had a significant increase in GPU temperature, after the third it got much better than it was when stock.
On the third I applied a bigger amount than what is necessary when applying on a desktop CPU.

 

Did you apply ICD7 on a laptop? I really don't think it would work well, it needs a significant amount of mounting pressure and I'm under the impression that no laptop mounting plate offers that.

 

Where are you getting this info? I use it all the time 'cause it's local..not conductive After reading the AS5 web site FAQ, three years ago, the word is slightly capacitive but not electrically conductive.

Did I miss something?

 

I suggest MX-3. It's very easy to apply and seems to work well. Is also non conductive.

 

Yeah the part where its like 98% silver and silver conducts electricity

Well that is not true per say but it is conductive and people have fried things with it, I dont care how "slightly" conductive it is even letting 1% of the current through in a place it should not be can spell disaster. This is why most people use and recommend AS Ceramic for more fragile projects like GPU cores if you plan to stick with the AS family of TIMs

 

Yes, I know bed is not a good place for laptop. It's just a habit. I would rather clean the laptop every year. Dell E6500 is very easy to clean.

My guess about lower bottom temperature with stock grease is:

Silver 5 is more efficient than the stock grease. So with stock grease, CPU or GPU may reach the level of temperature to slow down sooner than Silver 5, so CPU or GPU slow itself down to produce less heat?, is it possible for P9600 CPU or Nvidia 160M GPU? For the most of time I do coding and web surfing, I may not feel the drop on the speed.

I know it's very hard to believe. HWMonitor doesn't show anything different. The only difference I can feel is touching the bottom of laptop.

 

Again, it's not even slightly conductive. I DO care how slightly conductive TIM may be.. the word is capacitive

Where are the people who have fired things with it? per say?

The problem is most people don't know jack and that can spell disaster as well I just get tired of all the FUD that gets passed around public forums..not trying to pick fights.

 

I'm pretty sure I screwed up my hard drive with AS5.

Yeah and capacitivity (if you can give me the word for that) is worse than conductivity. Capacitors will increase voltage.

Also, in response to the beds kill laptops, I use my laptop on my bed sometimes because I cut out some of the plastic above the fan intake. It does pretty well only intaking air through the keyboard. Idle temps raise but its under a 10c difference.

 

Umm...I used AS5 on my GPU two weeks ago. The GPU was covered with some sort of very thin plastic though. It seems to be working just fine, but I might repaste with ICD7 as I need to add a copper shim anyway.

 

Yes. Heat it up first, apply it, and put manual pressure on it, then secure the heatsink. I put it on my Sager and temps dropped about 5-6C at max temp compared with AS5, and 1-2C idle. Not huge, but definitely any amount you can get is better. It kept my fans from kicking in as soon or as long and rarely goes to max fan speed now.

Best thing about it is it is not conductive and not capacitive, so less worry with accidental spread.

 

Gelid GC-Exteme is stupidly easy to spread, and according to tests performs marginally better than MX-3. Of the pastes I've used (AS5, MX-3, TX-4, AS Matrix, and GC-Extreme) the Gelid spreads the easiest.

Tuniq TX-4 wasn't anything to sneeze at, either. I haven't gotten a hold of AC MX-4, though from what I hear it's much easier to spread than MX-3.

 

There is a difference between using 99.9% pure silver, and being 99.9% pure silver. AS5 is not conductive. AS5 and its predecessor AS3, would not been the top dogs by unanimous decision for so many years if there was any real danger with their proper use. Many people, myself included, used to throw AS5 on everything all the time and never encountered any problems.

It is difficult to find any concrete examples of AS5 causing damage, but extensive research via google showed little to nothing other than a couple cases where AS5 was grossly misused by complete knuckleheads, like filling the socket with it. There also are a couple cases where the cause is truthfully unclear, but it is nevertheless attributed to AS5 anyway. It is funny that it's slight capacitance was never an issue for several years until new thermal pastes came out that could compete with it, and now people run around saying how unsafe it is.

Were you the one who said it was smeared on the circuit board and increased you seek times or something like that?

No, nothing in statement is true.

 

Yes, I was the one. You're right I'm not totally sure what the deal is with that hard drive, I haven't been using it and it could be totally okay.
One thing thats absolute is it wont boot to an installation it used to. It immediately blue screens. I can't remember anything I did to cause that.

There is definitely a way to use capacitors to increase voltage. That was my mentality behind the statement. Obviously it isn't worse than something thats totally conductive but if I had to choose between it being equally capacitive or conductive I would choose conductive.

 

Same here. I have used AS5 for many years and I haven't had any problems with it so far. I'm curious about ICD7 though...

 

I'm not saying AS5 can be ruled out, but that is extremely unusual.

 

i've heard many good things about AS5 and it was recommended till ICD7 came out.. OP your issue is strange.. my guess is that you applied too much.. since on your desktop you would apply more and on your laptop really u need 1 drop... You might want to try ICD7 but use 1 drop.

 

Going past the whole conductive/capacitive thing, AS5 does need a noticeable curing time, whereas most of the newer pastes (nominally) do not. Also most of the newer pastes do outperform AS5, to varying degrees.

 

It does work well in notebooks, I have been using ICD with my notebook and I didn't have to warm it up or anything.

I don't know why you would think notebook heatsinks don't have enough pressure.

There was an ICD thread in the gateway forum with lots of notebook results, don't think anyone had problems with pressure.

 

Just to clear any misconceptions, AS5 isnt composed of 99.9% silver, that would be ridiculous. Only a small portion of it is pure silver and the rest is thermally conductive metals and filler compounds.

What they mean by 99.9% is the purity of the silver they use.