The Unofficial Sager "Arctic Silver" Guide - Page 5

what like the little plastic sticks with fluffy cotton puffs attached to both ends?

Yes

I did this on my 5670 today. I did not do the lapping, just the Arctic Silver. I noticed an immediate decrease in temperatures of about 4-5 degrees C at idle. I also have pics of the install on the 5670 for anyone who is interested. I will post another thread once they are uploaded.

Thanks for all the pics, advice, parts list etc etc.
Made the job of doing my 8890 a breeze.
Mind you, removing the long fur ball of dust probably helped to drop system temperatures more than the AS goo has .

Just a word of advice for all you Sager owners, I would make sure you clean your heatsinks at least every 6 months (which will mean redoing the AS thing when you do remove the heatsink to clean it. The fur curtain I removed was phenomenal. Totally covered the heatsink intake, and I use my 8890 is a relatively clean environment.

Look what the cat brought up... (heatsink in background)



Fan vents on 8890 where the fur curtain formed.
(CPU before cleaning)

ok gents,

i got a final question before the arctic gets here and i bust this out on my machine. ive been trying to look to other sources away from this forum alone to try to formulate a complete understanding about the lapping(wet sanding) and application of the arctic silver. my conclusion is that there is a difference of opinion in how to apply the compound, and i would like to know what the main concensus everyone has come to before i do one or the other. i assume the majority of people reading this are 8890 users like myself and would prefer people using the same chipset (most sager users) that have done it to let me know what you guys think. im sure you've all read the tutorial here on this thread at the beginning of it, here is the alternative method i have found:

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_s...structions.htm

what do yall think? let me know! thanks again guys.

Hi buddasak, if I may offer my observations on the AS application.
What I did after taking the heatsink off was to remove the foil piece stuck to the heatsink (I actually sat there a cleaned this stupid thing until I realised what it was - DOH!). I used q-tips/cotton buds dipped in iso-propyl alcohol to get rid of the old thermal compound on both the heat sink and CPU Takes a few but eventually you get a clean q-tip.

The lapping takes a bit of care and attention. The idea is you start with the coarse (600 grit) wet&dry paper (btw auto-paint shops are the best place to get the finer sandpapers) tape it down to the glass sheet and pour a little (about 5-10ml) water on the sandpaper and carefully put the heat sink on the area where you put the water. Use a circular motion. At first it looks like you are making things worse.... but wait there is more. After about a minute on the 600 grit I tore that up then stuck down the 800 grit. More water then more circular motions. After that same deal with 1000 grit. I probably would recommend 1200 grit as well. 1000 is not bad but 1200 would give a better surface finish.

Ok dry it all off and give it a final clean with alcohol. What was suggested was the finger in the plastic bag trick which is what I did. I did not do any lapping on the CPU - it seemed to be good enough. I applied a dab of AS to my finger encased in the plastic bag and started to gently rub it into the top of the CPU. Felt wierd. Sort of like sticky at first then the viscosity drops and becomes rather smooth. I kept going until I had made the top of the CPU look like it had a grey smear all over it (just a smear mind you not a coating). Then following instructions I got my lint free cloth (obtained from an optometrists shop for $2) and began to wipe the CPU, but not too hard. The top of the CPU looked like it had AS there as it had a bit of a grey look to it but less that what the finger/plastic bag had left.

On the heatsink I used an old credit card to spread the AS. It takes a few dabs of AS to completely cover the area where the CPU touches the heat sink. Again the initial application is very sticky then it thins out as the AS goes into all the cracks. Don't be too accurate with staying inside the lines as you can always get a q-tip lightly dipped in alcohol to clean the edges up. You keep going until you get a smooth looking grey film across the relevant area of the heatsink (you will notice they have stamped in a set of corner markers in the heatsink to make your job easier). Notice I said film - not icing sugar thick, just a light film. As they say, less is more. Now just put the heatsink back in place. Simple. Works really well.

hey aussie, call me isaac.

well, as always it would seem that you've helped me out quite a bit. i wish i had seen your reply before i went around to all the hardware shops in town looking for 600+ grit sandpaper (none have any, big suprise) and the glass is hard to get as well apparenlty. however, after all day looking for these components, i was able to walk away with the knowledge of looking at an auto shop for the sandpaper and new knowledge about where an auto shop is. hopefully monday (after thanksgiving weekend) i will be able to get the rest of the things i need, including the AS in the mail. so, in conclusion, i will go with the smear tatic used in the forum tutorial and as described by you for application onto the chip and heatsink. so all i want to know for now, is did you clean the heatsink in any way besides as described? removing the dust from it, and did you remove the dust from the fans, and if so, was it easy, and did you have to remove other parts from the laptop to get to them? thanks again gentelmen. and btw aussie, i love australia, us americans are big fans of australia, friends of mine just got back, cant wait to go myself some time.

Hi Isaac,
Best way to clean the dust out of the heatsink is to get a vacuum cleaner and suck the major gunk out. What I then did was to get a soft paint brush and gently brush and blow the heat sink fins to remove any remaining fine dust. My fans did not have anything on them so I didn't have to clean them. You may find the brush and vacuum cleaner approach with the fans works if you need to (careful you don't damage the fans with too much suction).

I had a good laugh about the hardware store visits. I must have rung quite a few before I realised higher grit papers are used by the auto industry - DOH!

We are quite lucky here in Australia. We are almost too small to be noticed (as a nation that is, our land mass is another thing altogether). Mind you it is nice to have the US miltary there if we ever need them (WWII in the Pacific being a prime example).
One advantage we do have over you 'merkins is that we are far more laid back things. Makes for a nice lifestyle. Less hangups.

Enjoy.

I was bored today, so I did the artic silver thing. Didn't lap the heatsink, just cleaned the hell out of it, mushed some AS onto the heatsink, wiped it off, put a thin layer on cpu, wiggled it a little to get air out and was done. I did not expect to see any differences really, but let me tell you, wow, huge difference. Temps are only really down a few degrees but the fan, when it ever does come on, barely has to spin and its off again...such a sweet mod. Went from 55degrees while playing WoW down to not once above 50.

I'm curious. The heatsink on my 8887 looked striated (micro-grooved) and looked like very hard steel. I made a half-hearted attempt at lapping, but didn't really think the grit paper was going to smooth it, so I quickly gave up. Regardless, the AS was a big improvement. Is your 8890 "striated steel"?

hey gel,

thanks for the follow up, if there were any questions left after aussie (which i think not) you've taken them away. thanks for the thread too, great tutorial and everything seems in order. however i wish AS was easier to get ahold of, it's taking forever for these people to send the stuff to me. im quite certain im going to use your method of application as stated in the thread. because i believe the larger the cpu connectivity point(as ours are huge) the better off it will be covering all the surface area that touches the heatsink. thus, the dot and spread method seems inferior, even if it is easier to screw up.

btw, aussie. i have taken the liberty to read up a little on ww2 recently and it would seem that the army from down under are pretty hard. (military man myself) it's obvious to me that the australians kicked @$$ the middle east campeigns.

thanks again for everything gents.

hey aussie,

how'd you get the heatsink out? i've got an 888E and i can't figure out how to do that. and i'm guessing it's not possible to get to the fans? dunno what happened, but today was the 2nd time i tried to clean the heatsink and now it won't boot.

puthupa

There are 4 captive screws that lock the heatsink to the CPU. You need to unscrew those. Be careful as they are spring loaded.

I read in another thread, or somewhere, that Sager (or Clevo?) tests whether applying Artic Silver is really worthwhile, and determined that it was not worthwhile on all models previous to the 9860, but that on the 9860 it was deemed worthwhile, so the 9860s come with the Artic Silver already applied. What is the consensus here on whether it is really worth the time and effort to apply Artic Silver to the 5660, and if it is worthwhile, why didn't Sager just do that in the first place? I should add that I also read, consistent with what Aussie has posted here, that Sager strongly recommends cleaning to reduce heat issues. It is hard to say whether the better temps people are reporting with AS are really due to the AS or due instead almost entirely to cleaning?

My guess they wouldn't do it themselves because it costs extra and is much more of a pain than just sticking the thermal pad on. Applying AS seems much more of a delicate job.

Either way the only real effect that AS has is to improve the heat transfer between the CPU and heatsink (ie. thermal conductivity). Due to the design of most computers they have a thermistor based cooling system which forces a cooling gas (air) or liquid (water, liquid nitrogen) across/thru the heatsink. As the cooling system uses a simple hysteresis (on/off) control mechanism the fans come on when its high set point is reached and go off then the low set point is reached. AS plays no part in the on/off temperatures. What AS does due to its higher thermal conductivity is transfer the heat more effectively thus if the transfer characteristics of the heatsink allows for even more heat to be dissipated for a given air/liquid flow the CPU will cool quicker and the fans shut off sooner (ie. decreasing the on time). Down side is that the AS may cause the on cycle to happen earlier as the CPU's heat will more effectively transferred to the the heatsink. When it comes to enthalpy there is no free lunch. Entropy makes it even worse - ps. Never explain entropy to a manic depressive.

Of course as erisalit32 mentions cleaning the vents has a much larger effect than any thermal compound.

Thing is Ge|atinous Fury that you will not see any change in idle temps as they are controlled by the fan controller. The laptop will just cycle from the lower setpoint temperature to the upper setpoint temperature. The only difference will be the fans are on for a shorter period of time as the thermal conductivity has improved therefore the heat can be removed more efficiently (read quicker).

Under continuous load the high speed fan mode will cut in but again the length of time the fans are on should be shorter at the higher speed.

You have to realise that the amount of heat generated by the laptop for any given task load will be a constant. Changing the thermal compound will not change the temperatures per se as the fan controller has those set during manufacture.