that’s pretty awesome. i like that he even went into detail on the build of the mixer.

years later, we will start to use diamond based heat sinks…

Sandman what are you worried about? Is it the thermal viscosity and longevity of the silicon grease because I don’t think that you would have thermal degradation from the diamonds. Wouldn’t you have the same concerns for the standard thermal paste whose components are mainly the same silicone grease and silver dioxide plus or minus some other compounds.

I’m still waiting for the silicon in chips to be replaced with diamonds… soon…

Back in the days when I was a straight razor geek I used diamond paste on a strop to get a keen edge on the razors. It’s relatively cheap stuff and you can get it at several websites pre-made. Never thought about it as a thermal paste, but it makes sense. Here’s one website I located it at via Google. Damn reasonable price, too.
http://www.wickededgeusa.com/ZenCart/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=198&zenid=ednibb5gohhthdj8oh7bgdnd14

Diamond thermal paste has been available for years now from these guys:
http://www.innovationcooling.com/overview.htm

However it’s quite hard to work, making it hard to get a thin, even layer. Also, the cooling ‘gains’ are often invalid comparisons – many pastes take time and several thermal cycles to set up fully, where the diamond paste is at max efficiency immediately. I recently redid a CPU in Ceramique and it took several days of full cycle cooling before it hit peaked.

Also, fwiw, it’s never be worth a 19C shift regardless. That’s a test error or a bad previous install. Even the manufacturer’s wildest claims are only 12C. In my testing, it was more like 0 to 1C gain at best versus Artic Silver, Ceramique and others.

19c is a joke. Biggest diff I witnessed in my OC days was ~4c between ordinary silicon and silver something on unpolished heatsink/CPU combo. It goes down to <1c if you polish them.

for some reason i thought this had been posted here before. that is a freggin crazy old article.

diamond epitaxy – growing diamond xtals over a substrate – that may be an avenue of approach for a diamond heatsink.

Awesome hack, though I’m pretty sure I submitted this on the tip line like 6 months ago.

@MarTechRS: point taken…

@mark429: i lol’d.

diamond thermal paste? pretty cool but expensive lol

This is an old artical. however the measurments are close. i actualy did the same project 8 months ago on a Pentium D media center i have and i got a 14 degree drop using the stock fan. WTF was intel thinking with the short lived and to hot chip?

Sandman.
this is an example of a mixture, the one component is suspended (diamond) in the other (paste). however no chemical interaction has occurred, thus the life of the product could be reasonably considered to be the lesser of either the life of the suspended partials (diamond) or the life of the paste…
as such this solution will last for as long as the heat sink paste dose (easy ~10 years)

Aside from being an old article, did it bother anyone else that there was a picture of him holding a ir thermometer at the heatsink when measuring the cpu temperatures? If anything, the temperature of the heatsink should have increased with better thermal paste. Furthermore, those cheep IR thermometers are terrible at taking accurate readings of metallic surfaces, they are calibrate for e=.95 which copper, aluminum, or nickle don’t even come close to–anodized Al is about e=.1 which causes a huge error in the readings for a thermometer which calibrated at .95

1- Just in case someone is bothering about the expiration time of this compound.

How long do you plan to keep a computer anyways?

My best guess is that before any compound expires, the computer will be replaced with a new one.

2- Remember that a this kind of compound not only help to transmit the heat but also to fill the irregularities of the surface of both the processor and the heat dissipator. Many times, people put a little of paste, but they do not applied it over the whole surface, so when these surface touch, small “bubbles” of air are created. This is an hazzard for the temperature.

(Sorry for my broken english)

@Gerrit Coetzee:
You say one thing, but the site you link to says something entirely different.

Taken from http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appinstruct/as5/ins_as5_intel_quad_wcap.pdf:
“[...] apply a thin line of thermal compound [...]”
“After you apply the line of Arctic Silver 5 do _NOT_ spread the line out yourself. When you place the heatsink on top of the heatspreader of the CPU the line of Arctic Silver 5 will spread out just like an oval pancake. This is done this way to insure proper coverage of the heatspreader and a good minimum bond line between the two surfaces.”

“not” was in caps, but I put underscores around it because hackaday converts everything to lower case.

Ah. I didn’t see that.
I guess it makes sense that you would need to make absolutely certain that the whole surface of the die was covered on processors that lack heat spreaders.

Spreading the thermal paste on the whole IHS is nearly useless, FYI. The way you spread the thermal paste has also a lot to do with the thermal paste you are using. That’s why even if ICD7 is thick and hard to spread using more classical approaches it doesn’t matter.

Most of the heat (depending on the processor) is concentrated around the center, so you can make a “glob”, squish it and it will be fine as long as the circle width is as large as the IHS width and you did not apply too much. No need to cover the corners.

Spreading with a credit card, razor blade or other means usually degrade the performance by including air bubbles and unevenly distributing the oils in the paste.

Here’s good reading material with reliable, reproducible results.
http://hardwarelogic.com/news/137/ARTICLE/2752/2008-03-03.html

@everyone wanting diamond-based heat sinks and chips:

A number of years ago a considerable amount of research went into trying to use diamond for things such as chips other high-tech gadgets. The problem they ran into was that it proved to be impossible to reliably grow quality diamond on anything except diamond. This was mainly due to the lattice mismatch between diamond and everything else. In the end, the research has pretty much been abandoned as unfeasible.

I really like this idea though: I’ll probably do something similar the next time we need some kind of thermal paste for the lab.

Μight have been done before but it’s still a fun project Ι’d say

I would like to know how this compares with goop…
http://www.dansdata.com/goop.htm

Through you championing details. It helped me in my assignment