Removing old thermal grease or pad

[excaliber]

Heres a little trick I learned. Take your CPU or whatever that has some thermal grease or thermal pad stuck on it. Put it in a plastic zip lock bag, and remove as much air as possible. Put that inside another bag, and remove its air as well. This prevents much condensation from freezing on the chip/card.

 

Let it sit overnight. The next day, pop it out of the freezer and chip off the thermal grease/pad. It comes off very easily.

 

I've heard that solvents such as battery fluid and oven cleaner work well, but I wouldnt want that too close to my electronics, personally ;)

[AWS]

Great tip. Thanks for sharing.

I always use a fine grade sand paper to remove the paste. It's always good to lap the heatsink a bit anyway before you reapply any thermal compound.

I bet by using your method that the paste would come off much easier with less work.

[excaliber]

Yea, the lapping is good. You should (or someone else) should post a lapping tutorial. Im sure someone new would find that useful.

[BigMontana]

Heres a little trick I learned. Take your CPU or whatever that has some thermal grease or thermal pad stuck on it. Put it in a plastic zip lock bag, and remove as much air as possible. Put that inside another bag, and remove its air as well. This prevents much condensation from freezing on the chip/card.

 

Let it sit overnight. The next day, pop it out of the freezer and chip off the thermal grease/pad. It comes off very easily.

 

I've heard that solvents such as battery fluid and oven cleaner work well, but I wouldnt want that too close to my electronics, personally ;)

 

I prefer the old tried an true way of Thermal Paste removal.

 

From the CPU Core:

Use high-purity isopropyl alcohol and a bit of careful rubbing.

Do not use nail polish remover as it contains fragrance oils and other contaminants.

 

From the Heatsink:

Use xylene based products (Goof Off, some carburetor cleaners and many brake cleaners.) or mineral spirits.

 

From the CPU ceramic:

Use any of the following cleaners.

Any dish detergent (Dawn, Lux, Palmolive, Etc.)

Do not use soap for an automatic dishwasher to clean a CPU.

WD-40, citrus based grease removers (Goo Gone, Etc.)

Xylene based products (Goof Off, some carburetor cleaners and many brake cleaners.)

Mineral spirits. (Be careful to keep the mineral spirits away from the core.)

Once the majority of the compound has been removed from the ceramic, small patches remaining on the ceramic can be 'erased' with a soft eraser.

 

The above is what I have used for many years with success and are products that everyone has on hand. I printed this out a long time ago from Arctic Silvers web site and am sure it is still current. Who better to learn how to remove thermal paste?

[GavinO]

Nice tips on getting the grease/pad off after removing the heatsink. Any advice for removing a heatsink attached with that thermal epoxy stuff? The fan on my vid card died, but to get the replacement HSF on there, I need to find some way to break the old one free. Someone suggested the freezing thing; no success. I also tried heating the card up by running intensive benchmarking, then shutting down and pulling the card. Got everything really hot running it with no hand, but the epoxy stayed firm. Anyone had a problem like this before?

[excaliber]

You could try this link:

 

http://homepage.mac.com/dgiessel/PhotoAlbum5.html

 

Never tried, might/might not work. I've heard this is the 'standard' way of removing GPU HSF though

[SuBX3r0]

Nice tips on getting the grease/pad off after removing the heatsink. Any advice for removing a heatsink attached with that thermal epoxy stuff? The fan on my vid card died' date=' but to get the replacement HSF on there, I need to find some way to break the old one free. Someone suggested the freezing thing; no success. I also tried heating the card up by running intensive benchmarking, then shutting down and pulling the card. Got everything really hot running it with no hand, but the epoxy stayed firm. Anyone had a problem like this before?[/quote']

are you sure it's epoxy? usually they just use thermal pads or thermal grease with push pins. if it is indeed epoxy, you may be better of getting an rma if possible. epoxy is stronger than super glue and basically will almost definately cause damage to the chip if you try to remove it with conventional methods. you may even completely rip the chip from the pcb, i've seen pictures of such things on the net.

 

what card is it btw?

 

if you can't get an rma, and can't safely remove the hs, then i'd suggest getting a small fan and strapping it over the heatsink, of course removing the old fan in the process.

[GavinO]

My original thought was that it was a pad with pins, as there were pins in there that I popped out. The way that the heatsink has stayed on there, though, makes me think that its definately an adhesive. The major chip damage/chip removal is why I've been generally gentle to this point. I looked into the CD/razor blade/screwdriver technique, but there's a row of surface-mount caps and resistors along the only open edge, which I'm loth to put pressure on. The board is a GeForce3 Ti500 with the Personal Cinema kit on it (meaning that its kinda funky looking and cramped). RMA's pretty much out of the question; had the card for a while when I noticed the fan being broke during a HDD install. Being that it's a GF3, I'm probably going to wait for it to fry itself (unlikely; I've run heavy benchmarks for hours on it with no ill effects) or until I build a new machine (probably not till BTX and PCIX get finalized). If I come up with something, I'll be sure to post on it though.