What did I miss?

Well I can see it's been a while since i've posted anything on here.  No, I'm not dead; i'm Not lazy I swear; and no I'm not reading your mind.

I had to attend my Friend's wedding the first weekend in September, and boy was it hot!  Fun weekend though, found some interesting carvings at the park where we went discgolfing:

 

Anyway, It's been a busy week or two since.  Back and forth getting new projects going with friends, and trying to clean up and maintain the plethora of computers I have running can get a bit time consuming.

My main workstation needed some TLC, so my friend Mok and I took a compressor to it and blew out all the dust that I could, cleaned up as much dirt buildup and then proceeded to take apart my graphics card and CPU to redo the thermal compound on them.  

Normally, Isopropyl alcohol should do the job on electronics... However, depending on what percentage you use and how much you use, it tends to leave a film, and for critical heat producing components this could be problematic.

This is all we had though.  So, I set about cleaning after I had taken apart my graphics card.

There's the plastic cover that creates the tunnel for the airflow to direct itself into the and out of the heatsink,  and a metal chassis piece that provides much stability to creating pressure and sealing contact against the heat producing components like the RAM and other bits that have thermal pads covering them.  All the thermal pads were dried up and disintegrating so I cleaned all that off.

  

The Heat sink had most of the Thermal compound on it, and was extremely dried up, we could see cracks and dry spots on the heatsink as well as the GPU.

The only thing I worried about was the invisible layer of film residue left behind by the quick-drying isopropyl on the GTX480.

I took the time to cut up some pieces of thermal pads i had laying around from old hard drive kits, and replaced them over the RAM and components that were originally covered before.  The pads I had were pretty thick so once I finished cutting them, I could put the metal chassis back onto the card and then worry about the heatsink and GPU itself afterward.

 

Mok explained to me the finer points of placing Thermal compound in patterns so as not to cause bubbles.

In this Quick link is an interesting video to show what happens with different types of thermal compound and the spreading process when clamping a heatsink onto the exposed surface.

Another thing to be aware of is how the Heatsink's contact surface is shaped (which isn't very easy to spot if u ask me).
The same guy that made the video also made this image for explanation.

So, chassis piece put back together, time to apply thermal compound and get this beast back together!

We got my PC back up and running and kept eyes on the temperatures of everything.  While things were running quite hot at first they've since leveled out to more reasonable temperatures.  Next time only 99% Isopropyl  (license required).

Did I mention we got it up and running just in time to start importing and editing footage from a shoot we did a late night before?  Anyway, I'll be posting a separate topic on that shortly, but first.  The rest of this madness on computer cleaning continued later in the week when I found time to clean out and re-do the thermal compound on two of my server computers.

The first server computer I have is my previous build, an intel core 2 duo with a Geforce 7900 GT card, which I haven't touched since I purchased it.  It desparately needed some new compound!

 

The RAM seated around the chip is completely exposed to the air and apparently doesn't get that hot (most likely due to the speed compared to newer cards - for example the clock speed on the GTX 480 is 1700 mhz), a card this old doesn't run that fast.

Back in it went, and then time for the CPU.  It wasn't so tough, aside from the silly way they mount it!  Had to use some unorthodox methods of push and pull, though I really liked the quick release screws with quarter turn heads.  Very easy!

 

The CPU compound was completely dry, cracked and in desperate need of replacement,  a quick clean job (i'm getting used to this), and back in everything went.

The last thing on the list was the case was removing the broken 200mm case fan.

Clearly cracked down the center, I'm not sure why.  I think I got the case with the fan already broken as the case box was retaped several times when I purchased it from the local Best Buy.  Ohwell, simple fix with some gorilla glue ought to fix this guy right up.

The last machine was an older server I put together running an AMD Athlon XP 2.4 ghz single core with 2 gb of RAM and a cheapo graphics card just for getting a video output.  It's been an awesome machine for it's age and using it as a file and media server, even after all these years of abuse, it's running like a champ!  However, the thermal compound is almost as old as it is, so I took the time to redo the CPU as well.

I refrained from taking pictures because it's just more of the same.  Anyway, on to the next topic; next blog post!