Classic ThinkPad Thermal Paste Change
vermaden.wordpress.com
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I ended up going with Prolimatech PK-3 as it's a fairly viscous thermal paste, and it has held up well for the past six months. Although, I have noticed slightly higher max temperatures than when I originally applied it, but nothing alarming.
It's designed for sub-zero overclocking (thus, the name), and has thinner siblings, but I chose it specifically how thick it is, and how it has no curing time. Sub-zero overclocks has the worst pump-out effect due to the vast range of temps you can travel.
The pump-out on my MBP with stock paste was absolutely absurd (hardly any paste left on the dies, almost entirely shoved to the very edges of it), but given the past year, it has had less thermal degredation than my tube AS5 historically has (which is near-zero, I just have to repaste it every 5-8 years, or "once per life of device").
Apple's own paste didn't survive 3 years, or basically went to shit right after Applecare ended. Suspect this is on purpose, but, obviously, can't prove that.
Edit: By the way, thicker pastes require a little bit more pressure to get good contact. I suggest everyone get a torque screwdriver that can be set to 0.6 Nm/5-6 lbf to screw their heatsink retaining screws on.
Intel and AMD have pretty consistent recommendations, as do GPU manufactures, and they range from 0.8 to 1.2 maximum. 0.6 is enough to not risk overtightening, and is also enough to make thicker pastes happy; 0.6 is also Noctua's universal recommendation.
Also, Arctic Cooling's MX4 is another popular thick paste (usually for GPUs, not CPUs, seems to be more consistent on large dies) that likes high pressure mounts.
Bare die CPUs (laptops, delidded CPUs, etc) don't seem to be big enough to cause issues. I imagine, if I have to repaste the laptop, if it even lives that long (it is from 2012 as it is), it's going to be another 4 years down the road.
In my imagination, it seems like the less paste you have between whatever is emitting heat, and the heat sink, the better- so long as there aren't air gaps.
I see there are many forum posts where people show that it does not, but it feels like the closer proximity of the heat sink to the hot object should _improve_ conduction!
May be just me, as I was expecting oldschool to be IBM Thinkpad.
Anyway you could get $100+ worth of performance simply by using better thermal paste. Unfortunately most Laptop Vendors refuse to do it for whatever reason. May be it is trade off between how long the paste would last?
And while we have trillion dollar worth of silicon improvement in the last decade, are there any recent innovation in thermal paste or thermal cooling?
Regardless of how well you move heat around, all heat is waste. If the goal of better cooling is better mobility, then your bigger limiting factor is that you don't have sufficient battery technology to afford wasting that energy as heat, not that you don't have the technology to sufficiently cool the device. The best innovations in cooling are the improvements in silicon. In the past decade, we now have commonplace consumer PCs that don't need active cooling at all.
30 years from now we're going to look back at the people who tried really hard to cool their silicon better like the people who tried really hard to make their vacuum tubes last longer.
Agree and fair enough. We are going to see an iPad Pro with 5nm SoC that will be ridiculously fast.
This is the real crime. Its 2020, can't we have a better physical interface than a flat surface?
Carbon nanotubes! But they're rather fragile, expensive to manufacture on a commercial scale and you'd be fighting 30+ years of legacy products, marketing and manufacturing infrastructure.
There's also longevity to consider. I'm not aware of any reviews that test what the best thermal paste is after five years of thermal cycling.
This year (2020) I completely dissembled it and replaced the thermal paste with new good quality one. It still overheats and throttles.
Back then (2012) I chose this laptop mostly going on ThinkPad reputation for easy upgradeability/ repairability. Boy did I get unlucky... what a bad choice. It's the hardest laptop to disassemble I have ever had the displeasure to work on. To get to the fan assembly you literally have to remove every other component.
In retrospect the reason for this is obvious. The t420s was supposed to be a slim version of the t420 (which by then was already considered thick as a tank). I guess in a away the t420s was Lenovo's first attempt at a proper slim portable laptop. Unfortunately for me the result was a slim, hard to disassemble, short battery life, overheating mess...
I've got a P51 that's 2 years old now I think.
The fan is always on max. And it's hot, like I wouldn't wear shorts and put it on my lap hot.
Or perhaps there's another cause?
The manufacture paste isn't supposed to expire and is designed for a long long life (5-10 years). That said, pump-out still happens.
Pump out is the result of thousands of thermal cycles of the heat source and the heat destination on the thermal interface material.
You might be able to fix your problem by replacing the thermal paste, but caveat is that "performance" thermal paste is MORE susceptible to pump-out and would need to be replace more frequently.
Manufactures choose "less performant" thermal pastes because they have longevity. You don't tell users to re-paste their CPUs on a year/bi-yearly basis.
DIY people choose the "performant" options because benchmarks happen only on the first day and non-performance means it's time to upgrade.
For you, replacing the thermal paste will improve the transfer of heat to the heat sink, but if your CPU/GPU generates more heat than the system can get rid of, it's MAX fan time. It's really a function of efficient your system is at generating and dissipating heat and what you are doing on the laptop.
I’d already recently (within days) replaced the thermal paste with the same paste but still one of them was getting 10-15 deg C hotter.
The one that was cooler had been through AppleCare and it appears the copper surface had been scratched up intentionally as well as some dents on the fins.
The worse performing heat sink looked immaculate aside from some dust over the years. The copper surface was polished smooth.
Just for the heck of it I swapped the heat sinks and now the temps were reversed.
In the end I figured maybe the heat pipes were damaged or there was some performance differences of the heat pipes during manufacturing.
Didn’t really put it under any load though, just installed Windows, drivers, and some software :)
Still, somehow the article reads like a promo for that paste.
I was curious whether the original factory paste indeed gets older to such degree that it causes the overheating. Instead, the only mentioning was that the old paste came off easily.
I replaced the paste on a few old ThinkPads. Mostly because I was cleaning/replacing the fan. For paste I used some no-name white goo, the kind you get in those pill-sized squeeze pouches. Usual procedure, nothing special, just wiped off the old thin layer; nothing crusty or peeling old paste. Other as old ThinkPads hum along well without any re-pasting.
Perhaps, this story is just a case of reseating the fan and reapplying the paste, than ThinkPad paste got old.
But the paste still ages and dries out, even liquid metal will age (by virtue of it eating the metal of the heatsink over time).
Good rule of thumb is repaste after 4 years if it’s a factory paste, and every 18 months if it’s an aftermarket performance paste (like arctic silver).
It will still perform decently; it’s not like your machine will die, but it’s not ideal.
My next project is to replace the fan/heatsink of my i7 x220 with the x230 one, which is supposed to be just as efficient but noticeably quieter.
I should have thought about thermal paste - these machines don't have clogged fans.