Microscopic Thermal Management

Cleaned up Hudson M1 in foreground, pasty CPU in rear

The Gigabyte E350 motherboard runs fairly hot; anywhere from 40 degrees to 75 degrees Celsius. To help reduce the heat, I wanted to replace the manufacturers thermal paste with some Arctic Silver 5. It has been suggested that this could increase the heat dissipation from the chips enough to drop the temperature by about 5 to 10 degrees. Every bit of thermal reduction is a bonus in computers.

Thermal paste increases heat dissipation by filling in the microscopic imperfections in the surfaces of both the microprocessors on the motherboard and the heatsink sitting on top of them, thus allowing more thermal conductivity between the two.

After removing the heatsink from the motherboard it was a bit of a task to remove the existing thermal paste. Using some 99% strength rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs, and some patience, the chips and heatsink were looking shiny and new.

A small rice grain size blob of thermal paste was applied to both the CPU and the Hudson M1 Fusion Controller Chip. The heatsink was reapplied and screwed into place.

Everything mounted and ready for power on

In order for the thermal paste to properly set, the computer had to be run for a few hours. It actually takes around 200 hours of uptime for thermal paste to get to its final consistency. This meant I needed to put the motherboard into the NES case and fire it up for the first time since installing the OS on the hard drive.

With fingers crossed I hit the power switch. A split second later the souped up NES was firing on all cylinders and booting into Windows 7. The LEDs on the front looked great as well. The green power light was nice and bright and the red hard drive activity light flickered brightly mixing with the green.

I let it run for a few hours while monitoring the temperature of the chips. It ran as hot as expected, around 55 to 64 degrees at idle and 78 degrees with a full load test of the CPUs cores. I still need to kill some heat. Looks like I'll be adding that extra exhaust fan after all.