A problem that's been occuring on this dinosaur* recently is heat, even running slightly underclocked (!), I've pulled 50+c idle. I've simply known that what once was thermal paste sitting snugly between the heatsink and CPU core is now harder than my and your fingernails, since I changed the CPU from an old crusty Duron 1200 to the current Athlon XP 1800+ about a year ago and simply skipped applying anything, mostly down to not having anything suitable to apply. Butter? no.
*
I only got the idea to document this halfway through, so I'm missing photos of the heatskink before I blew all the crap out, apologies.
After getting into the case and prying the heatsink off, here's what we're greeted with:
The pink stuff around the core is rock solid. The darker stuff on the core itself is mostly solid too, though some parts are slightly soft, and a gentle but determined once-over with a paper towel results in our shiny new clean core
:
Our thermal compound of choice is a drop from a borrowed tiny tube of arctic silver 5. I put a blob on the center of the core and then spread it around a bit with a dunlop 2.0 mm guitar pick, which worked rather nicely.
A thorough rubdown on the base of my heatsink results in it looking as good as new. It was terrible before, the same black stuff as was on the core, and lots more of it, as well as a bunch of still almost sticky white compound. Looks like this heatsink had had multiple coats.
Heastink fan going back on:
Yay, now to assist in the heat thing with installing a spare fan into that area on the left that is simply begging for one. I found some spare fans that fit that size. 2 plain black ones, and one clear ricer one with blue LEDs and everything. Knowing that having blue LEDs increases framerate, I made the wise choice.
I could only find one zippy tie:
This of course is not enough to hold the fan stable. So what do we do? We find a bag of random bits and improvise of course!
Turns out they're the perfect length:
All looking good so far
All connected up, WILL IT WORK? :gonk:
YES!
Actually, and maybe you noticed, put the fan in the wrong way around, it was sucking air into the case rather than blowing it out. I switched that around after =)
Not for the squeemish, here is (some of) the dust retrieved from our little adventure, thumnailed out of consideration.
SO. Now that that's done and dusted (no pun), what about temps?
As you know it's an Athlon XP 1800, which runs at 1.53Ghz on a 133Mhz FSB. I didn't even bother keeping it this on first boot after the service, I bumped the FSB up to 144Mhz. I've been on here for about an hour now, not particularly stressing it, but moderate CPU usage. Considering I
idled at 51-54C before, I'd say this is pretty good:
I might try and shoot for 2100+ or 2200+ later, this is a thoroughbred core after all
Now, somebody warp me back to the year 2003 with this entry so it would be so much cooler
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