Thermal transfer compound comparison (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Thermal transfer compound comparison (2002)

dansdata.com

37 pointspwg22 comments

I’ve still got my trusty tube of Arctic Silver. I miss the days when these things mattered and CPUs were overclocked and new faster CPUs seemed to come out all the time. It was a fun era. Now I can’t tell the difference really what CPU is in a machine.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pc-cpu-sales-decline-30-ye...

I bought a second hand desktop PC during the pandemic because hardware was so hard to get, it had a 4770 CPU in there. I didn't look up the details, I just thought cool, 16GB and quad-core with hyperthreading. That should do for some browsing and basic office work.

For 95% of the tasks this thing is absolutely fine and I struggle to notice any difference between this and my 2k workstation at work.

I threw in an AMD 580 GPU and I've even been playing Horizon Zero Dawn, Death Stranding and Prey and it's been fairly smooth with a mix of high and medium settings.

I recently discovered that the 4770 is now 10 year old! it's great that hardware can now last (a lot) longer but a part of me is also sad that we don't have the crazy performance gains that we used to have anymore.

Recently my relative went and bought an RTX 4070 even though his setup includes an Intel 6770 and a motherboard with 16x PCIe 3.0 lanes, which IIRC can't accept more than one generation newer CPU.

Turns out the performance penalty is in the low single digit percentages - if at all.

Some 10 years ago, I had a i7-2600k at home and my motherboard died. Of course this happened Saturday after the shops were closed, so had to use some old left-over parts.

Didn't have a compatible MB but found an old MB with a dual-core Celeron on it, and 4GB of RAM. So installed that, paired it with my GPU, an AMD HD 4870, and a spare SSD with a fresh copy of Windows 8.1.

Even with the limitations of dual-core Celeron and only 4GB of RAM I could play most of my games with quite acceptable framerate. General usage was surprisingly fine thanks to the SSD.

Was quite shocked as well to find how usable the whole setup was.

> For 95% of the tasks this thing is absolutely fine

At work I got a 4770k too, bought it exactly 10 years ago. Besides adding more RAM so I could run some more VMs and upgrading from a SATA SSD to NVME it's chugging along fine. Most of my time is spent on reading specs, documentation or mails, writing code or queries and similar.

Sure build times would probably come down some, but we're not using C++ so build times are like 1-2 minutes tops anyway.

Figured it was time this year to upgrade, all the others have swapped out their laptops about 3-4 times in the same period, though it would be more like a preventative measure. We're a Windows shop so at some point I'll have to upgrade from Windows 10...

I liquid metal'd my laptop and it no longer thermally throttles when doing a C++ build lasting 10 mins or so.

Probably refreshing with any thermal paste wouldve done the trick based on this article. Some of them do dry out and I also replaced it in my GPU to great effect with some random paste that was included on a cheap Amazon cooler from a few months back that I had left over

I used it back in the day and other than it being neat to see my CPU and heatsink meld idk if I saw any improvement.

Both were lapped as was the style at the time.

PS5 now uses liquid metal IIRC

Arctic silver, that's not a name I've heard for many years.

It's all about the Kryonaut for me now.

"Let's do it again, but for phones this time" was fun for a minute but even that seems to have stalled now.

Battery technology limits the fun, as well you can only dissipate so much heat with the footprint of a phone without getting hot enough to burn a user. I'm not a phone designer but I imagine buyers wouldn't dig a phone that comes with hot surface warnings.

As do I! That stuff works damn well, I still use it on SBCs and 3D printer controller boards.

Funny story, but this stuff matters more than ever now due to Moore's law stopping when it comes to power consumption.

It's just that now it is all happening in the data center where they can really measure the difference.

Yep... As we hit limits the limits of air cooling, there's a cambrian explosion of liquid cooling companies now... single phase immersion, 2 phase immersion, "precision cooling", direct to chip cooling, spray cooling, etc.

There's a blast from the past. Dan's Data was excellent - wish he was still blogging.

From the Golden Age of the Web!

HW sites always tested immediately following paste applications, which of course was imminently reproducible, but to me it's more important what it's going to perform like in a year, two years, even three. Understandably that's orders of magnitude more expensive to test.

I'd like to atleast see it run at 85 celsius for a day and then results reported and a visual check.

You could even leave the heatsink off to see it's dried.

That's why you should look into industrial stuff. Like 'Kerafol' and 'Keratherm'. Or the equivalent things from 3M. Do you really think industrial hardware suppliers would use the hyped scams catering to the same scene which enjoys blinky LEDs on their RAM with no function at all?

It isn't even more expensive. Just harder to get.

I sometimes think the enthusiast overclocker things are mostly the same stuff anyways, just split into smaller lots, with different labeling and packaging. And at least 10 to 20 times more expensive :-)

Even liquid metal is just galinstan. You can easy procure a small bottle for the fraction of the price of marketed liquid metal.

Toothpaste. Ha. Love it.

Vegemite without butter. WTF was he thinking?

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