*braces to get razzed about his system*

I run a rather simple system compared to most people. It has been a rather long and interesting road. Started out as a pentium 233 socket 7 in a super 7 board. I naturally upgraded to a K6 2 400mhz super 7 chip then started to take a notice in the cpu tempature. Yeah, yeah, it ain't a modern 1+ghz system but it does *most* things I want while I wait for the IRS to get back to me on my tax return. With the origional heat sink and fan from the pentium in a caseless system (imagine a board with wires and cables to stuff sitting near it.) it would run about 50C. This was after rebooting several times to match BIOS to Motherboard Monitor 4.18 while realizing that even then it would be off by a degree or two. But its close enough for government work. So 50C using Arctic Silver III paste on this aluminum block with a low fin density. We are talking 12 fins only. I put the system into a case and punch a 92mm hole in the front of it to feed a temp. variable Antech 80mm intake fan and 80mm Stealth rear out take fan. It dropped it to 40C or so. This is good, but not good enough, its chilly now here in California and the room is not airconditioned. Summer time it will be its usual brutal 90F to over 100F somedays. I worry that will not be enough to handle these high temp extremes and want to go cooler if I can. Especially after hearing with heat sink and fan people can achive 38C max on a P4 or AMD Athlon. So I swapped out the heat sink for one rated for AMDs. I didn't change the paste, just added a little more and smoothed it out. It ran a little worse, up to 43C or so. So I swapped in the origional again, and again adding a little more silver thermal paste to the cpu to replace what came off on the heat sink and smoothing it out. Now my origional heat sink is running 3C hotter. Should I have washed off the CPU and replaced the paste each time I replaced the heat sink? I washed off the heat sink as I didn't want silver paste all over creation after I removed it but the paste usually remains in all the microscopic holes with in the metal. I can't think of too many other reasons why it would. And again, just got a copper based Dynatron 60mm cooler in my quest to force it cooler and it, like the aluminum pentium cooler, it is running at 43C in a chilly room. Actually it just topped 45C according to MBM 4. I did remember to lap in the silver paste into the base of the new heat sink and added enough paste to the cpu to compinsate for what came up on the heat sink and resmoothed it out level. Help? Thank you all for your time.

BelGarion

you need to clen off the heatsink and chip with denatured alcohol, then apply a very thin layer of AS3. You should almost be able to see through it!

see true it?? wow , gues i put on WAY to much ..


greetz

Denatured alcohol? I have been using acetone aka fingernail polish remover. That I can find, were in the heck do you find denatured alcohol? In a denatured bar? Just kidding, but seriously, why specifically denatured alcohol and where do you get it? Thanks!

BelGarion

dunno think was wanted to say, you need to un-fat it, do all the fat off, or for cleaning it


greetz

U can get denatured alcohol at any local hardware store.

you can use fingernail polisg remover to cant you?

Windex, maybe?

i use isopropyl alcohol that u can get at any pharmacy

That's what I use...

If I'm just cleaning the base of the heatsink (w/o fan) I'll use soap and water... and then dry it...

If I'm cleaning off the CPU/GPU I'll use a razerblade and some isopropyl.

Good, then I'll stick to the acetone then, its cheap and easy to get ahold of, and sometimes you can get it in stylish colors too! The current bottle is purple, and I mean the liquid, the bottle is see though. Thanx all, that's what I suspected, so I'll run down this weekend and pick up a tube of Arctic III and wash off the CPU and heat sink and replace Arctic III that's been there since day one though several heat sink swaps. Anyone with suggestions how to get this K6-2 400 down to near ambient tempatures? If the goo swap works I'll be using a copper based micro fin 60mm square heat sink for an AMD XP with a dynatron fan (though I'll look for a 3 pin to 4 pin, see if perhaps the board can't spin the fan up to full speed by plugging it into one of the drive power connectors.) and Arctic Silver III , two case fans (Though someone, not here, suggested the thermal controlled fan should be an exaust, the Stealth the intake, which would make my setup backwards if that's true.) . Though I am also considering the rounded cables if just for the convience. I run SCSI cd and cdrw drives along with ATA hard drives so that's 3 cables, one being really wide (50pin SCSI II) run though out the case. Thanx all.

BelGarion

i cant beleve it ran that hot i had a 333, a 400, a 450, and a 500mgz k6-2 and they all ran just above room temp with a crappy hsf