I hate to keep throwing away these little tubes of thermal paste but I have no idea what their shelf life is. Anybody know?

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

I hate to keep throwing away these little tubes of thermal paste but I have no idea what their shelf life is. Anybody know?

Not sure. Given it is a sealed tube I imagine it should say good for quite some time. The oldest I have is around 5 or 6 years old & I was just using it to regoop an old P4 heatsink recently.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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Wow, I will be keeping them now.
Thanks

I hate to keep throwing away these little tubes of thermal paste but I have no idea what their shelf life is. Anybody know?

Not sure. Given it is a sealed tube I imagine it should say good for quite some time. The oldest I have is around 5 or 6 years old & I was just using it to regoop an old P4 heatsink recently.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

That old dell of mine has a bit of a story. After I got to this group and saw how you used those monitor's like SIV64 and the others. I put a copy of it on my old dell and discovered that it was running in the nineties. I found out you had to clean these HSF out once a year or so and since I never have cleaned mine at all, nearly 5 years, I cleaned it out. Not only did the temp go in the seventies, but that loud whiney noise that it made when I pushed it to recode movies, disappeared. That was a good day.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

I got the 12-gram tube of Arctic Silver 5 back in 2005. I still have about a quarter of the tube left. I've used it on at least 50 CPUs/GPUs/chipsets.

It has gotten a bit thicker and less willing to spread using a razor blade in recent years, but it still works great once you get it spread into a nearly-see-through coating.

The "white chalky compound" (also known as ceramic-based) dries out and becomes effectively useless after about 2-3 years. It is also super cheap and that's why manufacturers and OEMs use it for everything in those pre-made squares on heatsinks that end up being bigger than the contact patch that is needed..sort of a "one size fits all" kind of deal.

First thing I do with any new heatsink is scrape that chalky crap off and apply Arctic Silver 5. When I built my current rig two years ago and re-used my 8800GT, I took it apart and took the heatsink off of it and cleaned it up and put AS5 on there instead. I noticed a 10C drop at idle conditions just from changing the compound out (although, the 4-year-old dried-out chalky compound was probably most of the blame for the higher temps).


However, despite the claims about how Arctic Silver 5 "never dries out" are in fact wrong. I took a heatsink off of my Athlon XP 3200+ machine about a year ago. I applied AS5 to it in 2005 right after I got the AS5. When I released the latches on the heatsink..the CPU came out of the socket with the heatsink. I twisted and pried and almost broke that delicate little Barton in the process, but it finally got released. The AS5 had dried out and become epoxy, basically.

So... moral of the story is.. replace your thermal compound every 2-3 years.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Thanks Cosmic,
Lot of interesting info there. I wonder how the other brands like cooler master stack up?

I got the 12-gram tube of Arctic Silver 5 back in 2005. I still have about a quarter of the tube left. I've used it on at least 50 CPUs/GPUs/chipsets.

It has gotten a bit thicker and less willing to spread using a razor blade in recent years, but it still works great once you get it spread into a nearly-see-through coating.

The "white chalky compound" (also known as ceramic-based) dries out and becomes effectively useless after about 2-3 years. It is also super cheap and that's why manufacturers and OEMs use it for everything in those pre-made squares on heatsinks that end up being bigger than the contact patch that is needed..sort of a "one size fits all" kind of deal.

First thing I do with any new heatsink is scrape that chalky crap off and apply Arctic Silver 5. When I built my current rig two years ago and re-used my 8800GT, I took it apart and took the heatsink off of it and cleaned it up and put AS5 on there instead. I noticed a 10C drop at idle conditions just from changing the compound out (although, the 4-year-old dried-out chalky compound was probably most of the blame for the higher temps).


However, despite the claims about how Arctic Silver 5 "never dries out" are in fact wrong. I took a heatsink off of my Athlon XP 3200+ machine about a year ago. I applied AS5 to it in 2005 right after I got the AS5. When I released the latches on the heatsink..the CPU came out of the socket with the heatsink. I twisted and pried and almost broke that delicate little Barton in the process, but it finally got released. The AS5 had dried out and become epoxy, basically.

So... moral of the story is.. replace your thermal compound every 2-3 years.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

However, despite the claims about how Arctic Silver 5 "never dries out" are in fact wrong. I took a heatsink off of my Athlon XP 3200+ machine about a year ago. I applied AS5 to it in 2005 right after I got the AS5. When I released the latches on the heatsink..the CPU came out of the socket with the heatsink. I twisted and pried and almost broke that delicate little Barton in the process, but it finally got released. The AS5 had dried out and become epoxy, basically.

So... moral of the story is.. replace your thermal compound every 2-3 years.

I have had the CPU come out with the heatsink a few times in the past. I found running the CPU hard to heat it up would normally reduce the chances of that occurring.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

However, despite the claims about how Arctic Silver 5 "never dries out" are in fact wrong. I took a heatsink off of my Athlon XP 3200+ machine about a year ago. I applied AS5 to it in 2005 right after I got the AS5. When I released the latches on the heatsink..the CPU came out of the socket with the heatsink. I twisted and pried and almost broke that delicate little Barton in the process, but it finally got released. The AS5 had dried out and become epoxy, basically.

So... moral of the story is.. replace your thermal compound every 2-3 years.

I have had the CPU come out with the heatsink a few times in the past. I found running the CPU hard to heat it up would normally reduce the chances of that occurring.

Normally if I start pulling on the heatsink and it doesn't want to easily come off, while the CPU is still locked into the socket, I twist the heatsink to try to get it to let go while leaving the CPU still in the socket. Sometimes.. that doesn't work.

Oh, and..when I was pulling the heatsink off of that Athlon XP.. I had just shut it down because it was idling at 57C and just the CPU load of shutting down made the temp alarm of 60C start going off during shutdown. Heat probably helps sometimes, but not always.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)