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Always amuses me how there's heat sink compounds sold to the PC enthusiast market and they're completely different brands than you'd see stocked by a traditiona

by mmagin 9y ago

Always amuses me how there's heat sink compounds sold to the PC enthusiast market and they're completely different brands than you'd see stocked by a traditional electronics supplier. I recently had to resupply myself with heatsink grease for non-computer uses so I got a boron nitride grease (Chemtronics CW7250), having been told that it's the best truely non-conductive material, short of the toxic beryllium oxide. I recently also used some reassembling the heat sink on a modern CPU and it seems to work just fine. And liquid metal alloys seem like a stupidly risky thing to use.

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Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> boron nitride Very hard materials tend to be very good heat conductors. Diamond would be slightly better, probably.
- mmagin 9y ago
  Yeah, I have noticed it appears in some of the PC enthusiast materials, I wonder why it has not received more widespread industrial acceptance. Obviously it is very abrasive, but I think tiny synthetic diamonds aren't that expensive. Maybe it's so far down the scale of diminishing returns to not be worth it?
  - tristor 9y ago
    Diamond is used in some of the higher end thermal pastes and they do perform marginally better than alternatives, but the problem is that they tend to cause micro-abrasions caused by the high-speed vibrations ICs do. This isn't too big of a deal when you're mounting a cooling block to an IHS surface, but if you're doing direct-to-die cooling (which many hardcore enthusiasts do) it can spell disaster.
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      Well, boron nitride should be almost as hard and abrasive as diamond. I'm guessing it's just the law of diminishing returns that works against diamond here.
adrianratnapala 9y ago
Maybe conductivity is an issue, but I don't see why things should be set up that way. I would ensure that both the heat sink and the top case of the CPU were grounded. I wounld't rely on that ground path, but any conduction along it would be welcome in my world.

by mmagin 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

> boron nitride Very hard materials tend to be very good heat conductors. Diamond would be slightly better, probably.

mmagin 9y ago
Yeah, I have noticed it appears in some of the PC enthusiast materials, I wonder why it has not received more widespread industrial acceptance. Obviously it is very abrasive, but I think tiny synthetic diamonds aren't that expensive. Maybe it's so far down the scale of diminishing returns to not be worth it?
- tristor 9y ago
  Diamond is used in some of the higher end thermal pastes and they do perform marginally better than alternatives, but the problem is that they tend to cause micro-abrasions caused by the high-speed vibrations ICs do. This isn't too big of a deal when you're mounting a cooling block to an IHS surface, but if you're doing direct-to-die cooling (which many hardcore enthusiasts do) it can spell disaster.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    Well, boron nitride should be almost as hard and abrasive as diamond. I'm guessing it's just the law of diminishing returns that works against diamond here.

adrianratnapala 9y ago

Maybe conductivity is an issue, but I don't see why things should be set up that way. I would ensure that both the heat sink and the top case of the CPU were grounded. I wounld't rely on that ground path, but any conduction along it would be welcome in my world.