Journal #8271

ooooh that sucks im sorry

My local radioshack carries arctic silver now - but you're gonna pay out the ass for it.
Rubbing alcohol will do fine. Just use a cotton ball or a Q-Tip AFTER you wipe most of it away.

Good luck!

Not entirely sure of what I'm looking at. The CPU heatsink fell off? I can't quite tell.

Yep, nope, I dunno. What he said ^

You don't need to remove the heat transferring solution. Only if it got onto something else than the CPU and the cooler. Cleaning with cotton, toilet paper, or any other soft cloth will do. No need to use alcohol. Only use alcohol if the solution got onto CPU contacts and nearby components.

And you don't need those high end expensive solutions either. I use 2$ thermal paste and my PC is running at 45C with stock cooler in any game.

Best thermal paste is definitely ceramic or silicon.

Make sure to tighten the heat sink back in securely. And inspect did the thermal solution get onto anything else. Those silver ones conduct usually.

"I use 2$ thermal paste and my PC is running at 45C with stock cooler in any game."

I used 2$ thermal paste on my GPU and the temperature rose by 5C. Better stick with the Arctic thermal paste, even the aluminium one is better than what regular electronics store have to offer.

But the question is: how did you manage to rip off the entire assembly from your motherboard? Because it's held with screws!

If I'm not mistaken, I think that's an AMD heatsink. They're usually secured with 4 plastic push-clips

Aw man that sucks, the exact same thing happened to mine a few years ago. Ruined my LAN night.

It didn't happen during the lan, it was coming back from it. I was an idiot and didnt get a taxi, even though my flat is only a 5 minute walk from where the lan was held, it's a bitch to carry a massive monitor and a massive computer along with all the peripherals that far.

It's the heatsink, somehowit fell off. I have no idea how. I can't see any damage whatsoever done to the motherboard components so it should be fine in that sense. Some of the thermal paste is coming off the top of the CPU and just for safety i've removed the spillage using a card. None of the paste has got onto any contacts though. It's managed to get on top of some other heatsink on the motherboard though :/

It's not an AMD heatsink, I checked when I was buying it and it fits an intel processor fine.

I'm going to remove all thermal paste and reapply it because I want as much conduction as possible, if i jam it back on now I'm going to see much less heat dissipation.

I can't do anything about it until wednesday evening ( tonight i'm revising for a physics test and tomorrow my 'buddy'
is coming up.. No gaming until after that) which sucks ass

GPU is one thing, CPU is another. Its much more resistant to excess heat.

WUTTTTTTT?