Applying new Arctic Silver 5 to T23 1.13 CPU Update *PICS*

[fefrie]

Well I finally decided to change the grease on my t23 1.13 ghz processor.

Took the keyboard off and un did some screws which exposed the fan underneath. It was a little dusty.


http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/hs.jpg


The processor had some sort of white stuff on, but only on 1/2 of it. The other half was on the heatsink.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/two.jpg

Dusty on the inside.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/three.jpg

Dusty on the Heat Sink too.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/four.jpg

Close up of the fan again.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/five.jpg

It was a little impossible, especially without a can of compressed air, to get rid of the dust, so I used my old sonicare toothbrush. If it's good enough for the teeth, then it's good enough for the heat sink. Brushes away plaque pretty good too.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/six.jpg


The fan portion was really easy to clean with the electric toothbrush.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/seven.jpg


All cleaned up. The brush is strong, and I had to be careful around the foamy parts. It would brush the foam away if I wasn't careful. The surfaces were cleaned with acetone. It cleaned it to a mirror finish pretty quickly.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/eight.jpg

On the processor, I put a half grain of AS5 and spread it with a razor blade. I put a smidgen on the heat sink too for good luck.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/ten.jpg

Put it all back to gether and just a couple of broken bits left. I consider myself lucky.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/eleven.jpg

I put the heat sink back on, and made the point of tightening the two screws closest to me first and leaving the top screw loose. I slowly tightened that screw so as to squish any air bubbles towards it. Don't know if it actually does anything, but it doesn't hurt to try.


After reassembling, I restarted the system, and the strangest thing happened. When I ran the Mobile Meter, the laptop said that it was running at 733mhz instead of the proper 1.13ghz. It was running much cooler, at 35c instead of the normal 50ish. Then it did the BSOD with the notification of physical dump of memory.

I turned off the computer and restarted, and it ran at the proper 1.13ghz frequency and the temperature bounces around 48 to 56 at idle. I went to shockwave.com to play "Speed Racer" which usually maxes out the cpu, the temp went to 77c before I got a chance to play the game and then it did the BSOD again.

I'm not feeling 100% great on how I spread out the grease, I may do it again, but I don't feel like doing it again at the moment.

Restarted again and tried to play Speed Racer again, and this time I was able to play. With the processor maxed, I played for a couple of minutes where the temp jumped from 50 to a max of 62. It didn't go any higher and when I stopped the game, dropped back down to 50 again.

Restarted the game, went up to 72 and stoped, dropped back into the low 50's.

I don't know if there's any improvement, but according to the as5 website, it takes about 200hours for the grease to 'bed' in. A couple of cycles should help it.

I'll post later what happens. Unfortunately I'm cpu temp obsessed for the next couple of days at least.

At least cleaning the fan was good. I don't think it was ever really cleaned in it's lifetime, and the sonicare cleaned it out pretty good.

The laptop at least is a little quiter, so the effort wasn't totally wasted.

SECOND Moderator edit: No PIC warning in subject line; please keep inline images ~50KB

[rkawakami]

To remove the fan/heat sink assembly from the T23 (from memory):

- keyboard (you got that)
- LCD hinge cover (three long screws on the bottom, at the back edge and one on top near Ultrabay cage)
- LCD cable (two screws securing connector to motherboard)
- keyboard bezel (three short screws under the rectangular covers on the bottom at the front edge; screw holding backup battery, screws on top near Ultrabay and where left trackpoint button normally is, both screws inside MiniPCI compartment holding ethernet card)
- three screws securing fan/heat sink (pull connector from motherboard)

Best resource is the Hardware Maintenance Manual:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4UYM3F

[RealBlackStuff]

Please modify the TITLE of your post, to include *BIG PICS* or something like that!

[BlueDevilTide]

Wow, this is incredibly helpful. I too have a 1.13 T23 and am thinking about doing this soon. I have no idea how clean/dirty my cooling system is, but I try to blow it out (without taking stuff apart, thru the grill) whenever I can.

Still...I'm concerned about the BSOD's. Were you having them before? Did they go away? And what caused them? I almost never have them and would not want to do anything to cause them.

[dsigma6]

Make sure the CPU is properly seated.

Run TPFancontrol and you won't have to worry about your temperatures anymore.

You're not going to get a BSOD because your paste job wasn't perfect. If the CPU isn't in all the way, or the RAM was put back in a bit crooked, you could get a BSOD.

Nice improvising with the toothbrush!!

[fefrie]

I was getting bsod's before and I did move the ram around a bit so the two bsod after reinstalling the heat sink may have just been coincidience.

The processor wasn't removed or reinserted, so it couldn't have been that

[dsigma6]

It wasn't removed, but the pressure from the heatsink was released from it. Don't assume anything!

[Temetka]

I think you may have had better luck in not applying any Arctic Silver to the heatsink. You applied the proper amount to the CPU, which is all that should be needed in a situation like this.

Glad everything else is working out though.

[agarza]

My thoughts:
- The better way to clean the CPU/heatsink is to use high purity Isopropyl Alcohol. Then apply the way you did only to the CPU core.
Some guys recommend droping the amount of AS5 to the center of the CPU core and just fit the heatsink without you spreading the compund, if you dissasemble again you might try this methid.

I'm also CPU obssesed, I'd like to dissipate heat more effectively via the heatsink.

[fefrie]

My thoughts:
- The better way to clean the CPU/heatsink is to use high purity Isopropyl Alcohol. Then apply the way you did only to the CPU core.
Some guys recommend droping the amount of AS5 to the center of the CPU core and just fit the heatsink without you spreading the compund, if you dissasemble again you might try this methid.

I'm also CPU obssesed, I'd like to dissipate heat more effectively via the heatsink.

I've always thought that was a better way to apply the compound. When I spread out the compound, it ended up having a bit of a choppy surface. A lot of opportunities to trap air in the compound.

I think that it would be better to have a big (yes big) blob in the middle of the process then have the heatsink squish the stuff out. Less air bubbles that way.

Six of one, half dozen of another.

the temp jumps around 49-77c which is a big swing with and average of about 60c, the fan seems to come on whenever, I'm fine with that. I should have monitored the temp a bit more before applying as5

I won't bother reapplying the AS5 untill I need to pop open the keyboard again. I find that the more I remove the keyboard, the less solid a typing surface it becomes.

I had a decent keyboard that I used to open all the time to play inside, and when I spilt water on it, the new keyboard that I got was perfectly flat, no bubbles or anything.

[fefrie]

Well when ripping DVD's onto the hard drive, the cpu usually goes to 100% and when trying again after installing the AS5, I would get BSOD's and error readings from the DVD drive repeatedly.

So on recommendation on others in this thread, I took everything out again and took a look at how the AS5 spread itself onto the heatsink and processor.

On the processor, I saw the stickyness, goopiness of the AS5 around the edges of the processor, but not quite as much in the middle, if you look in the middle you can see a grey empty zone that looks a bit like South Korea.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/SKorea.gif

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/12.JPG

And on the Heat sink, same deal. AS5 just around the perimiter, and in the middle an emptyness in the shape of Florida and the eastern seaboard and a bit of texas

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/13.JPG

Polished up the processor and heat sink again using acetone.

http://www3.telus.net/public/notsniw/t23/14.JPG

Reseated the processor.

And this time when applying the AS5, I did NOT apply it to the heat sink. However when applying it on the processor, I used a previous suggestion of putting a blob in the middle and letting the heat sink spread it out. But instead, I put a bigger blob in the middle and using the syringe tip of the AS5 container, dragged the compound to all the edges of the processor, making sure that no bubbles got trapped underneath.

I definitely used a lot more than the last time, maybe three times the amount, and for good measure, I put a bigger blob in the middle just before I put the heat sink back on.

I put the heat sink back on making sure to put it back on nice and level so that the middle of the heat sink would hit the peak of the AS5 on the processor and as I was screwing down the Heatsink, slowly jiggling it so that it would hopefully eliminate any air bubbles. Kind of like installing tile. It felt like a secure, suction fit.

Initially after turning on the laptop, after it takes a bit to load, the processor temp was reading at about 40c which is about 5c lower than it was reading before at that time.

Ripping the dvd again, no BSOD. Cleaning and reseating the ram conatacs may have helped too.

So it seems to be working better, although the DVD Rom Seems to be finicky and not reading the Discs properly without errors, but that's a different thread.

[agarza]

Good. Report back your load temperatures. On my T42p there's Zalman STG-1 on both CPU/GPU but my temperatures recently have gone way up. I also have a AS5 syringe, but I've been not impressed with the results I got.

I've heard of yet another themal paste that claims to be even better than AS5, it's called Arctic Cooling MX-1. I would buy a syringe and test it out on my T42p. I think the Zalman compound does not fill that well the microscopic valleys of the CPU/heatsink.
I'll keep you guys posted, however I do not live in the US, if I order that thing off e-Bay it might take a while to receive it.
Anyways I'm going on holiday next June.

[Temetka]

Have you looked in to 'lapping' your HSF for the CPU and GPU?

[agarza]

Have you looked in to 'lapping' your HSF for the CPU and GPU?

I've not received any replies yet. But I've learned that un-lapped heatsinks TIM like AS5 (with silver particles works better) because the particles fill out better the microscopic valleys on the metal

[fefrie]

Here's an image of processor temps while surfing on the net. Youtube mostly, processor usually runs around 50% when video is running on the screen.

Each "block" is equivalent to 2 minutes, so this graph is about a half hour in the life of the processor while surfing





I hope no one freaks because I posted this image. The file should be about 8kb, if it's too big, let me know

[fefrie]

Running at idle. Again each block is about 2 mintues. The beginning and end of the graph is when I was doing some stuff, but in the middle you can notice the smooth sine wave like oscillation.

Everything was turned off except for the items in the sys tray.

[agarza]

So are you content with your temps. I should say that idling should be about 45-52C

[fefrie]

Running at full CPU with DVDShrink.

Seems to stay pegged at about 64c

[fefrie]

So are you content with your temps. I should say that idling should be about 45-52C

It does run cooler at about 37c when the processor inadvertently runs at 733mhz. But asides from applying a different grease, I'm going to leave it be.

what else is there to do really without getting obsessive about it?

[dsigma6]

what else is there to do really without getting obsessive about it?

As I said earlier in the thread, run TPFancontrol.