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okay so you ask anyone on the internet what's the best thermal compound what's

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the best way to apply it to get a thousand different answers because

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there's everything from garbage like this all the way up to high-end

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compounds full of silver and and diamonds and all kinds of that crap

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but what everybody seems to pretty much agree on is how to remove it

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grab some 99 isopropyl alcohol got like

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tricks slap that on your CPU and bam thermal

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compound's gone but we thought to ourselves you know what

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conventional wisdom's not good enough for us so we got you guys 15 different

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solvents to find out which one truly

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removes thermal compound better than anything else

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the ripjaws km 570 mechanical keyboard from g-skill features full RGB a simple

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design cherry mx switches and more check it out now at the link below

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okay so you're probably thinking to yourself come on Linus the reason we

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don't debate this is we already know the

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best way to remove thermal compound but picture this okay

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it's late at night you got the big match tomorrow you're

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building up your rig you're ready to go except oh

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no there's no solvent it turns out earlier

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in the day little johnny took all the rubbing

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alcohol poured it all over his skinned knee and now you've got nothing left so

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you're rummaging around in the kitchen the pantry the bathroom and you come

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together with a list of stuff that looks

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a little something like this we've got 100

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orange juice we've got beer we've got distilled water goo gone vinegar more

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beer windex hydrogen peroxide absolute

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vodka vodka whatever you know what it is we've got

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nail polish remover alcohol-based hand sanitizer coke isopropyl at 70 and 99

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concentrations and finally arctic silver's fancy expensive arctic

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clean surface preparation and we're going to be testing each of them on the

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two major types of thermal compounds the more runny kind and the more kind of

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particulate kind okay so we're going to start with icy diamond and the

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methodology is pretty simple we take the thermal compound we go

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and with a clean CPU and heatsink we apply the usual grain of rice sized boop

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there you go and slap our nhu 12s cooler on top of it

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once it's screwed in all the way we give it the old wiggle to make sure it's uh

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fully spread out and leave it for a minute or two

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then we take off the cooler you can see how this is gonna get pretty old pretty

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fast and there we have it a dirty CPU

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now the original plan was to take our solvents and kind of

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uh dump them onto the CPU and then we

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realized oh yeah that's uh that's probably gonna make a bit of a mess hold

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on so as a compromise we settled on using the heatsink

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as our test surface with the thermal compound smear covered

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we left each one for 60 to 120 seconds

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to allow the solvent to do its work after the waiting period

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we wiped each one five times without applying too much

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force we're evaluating how well the solvent

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works not how hard we can press down on a

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heatsink then to test we take something very clean very fine

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so a coffee filter in this case

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wipe it off and boom

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that is how we collect our results for each solvent on each type of compound

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okay we are done

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screwdrivers down and we have the results okay most of them

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are not very surprising but some of them are

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basically here's how the grading works if there's anything on the coffee filter

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that's a fail so hydrogen peroxide i was expecting another topical sanitizer to

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do well no not so much beer

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epic fail almost all of it stayed on the

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heatsink windex this one performed

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okay it did leave a significant residue

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though so we'll call that a c minus hand sanitizer so it is an alcohol-based

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sanitizer and this actually performed really well so there's at least one

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household item that would work quite well distilled water was actually

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the worst not good for cleaning off your CPU

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goo gone though excellent result here we've got almost i

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would say nothing on our coffee filter

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arc to clean i mean this is a purpose designed uh cleaner so this one

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performed perfectly as well and nail polish remover

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this one came in really well remember this is an acetone based one though i

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wouldn't expect the same results from a regular one

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vodka okay guys so if you gotta clean

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your CPU with alcohol go with the vodka

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not with the beer here's our isopropyl alcohol i think

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we've put an end once and for all to the debate

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70 versus 99 we're going with doesn't frickin matter

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coke was basically tied with water and

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you get kind of a urine stain looking thing on your uh

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on your paper towel and the same goes with orange juice except even more urine

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finally we've got vinegar which worked actually

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much worse than i expected barely removing any of it and finally the

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golden standard isopropyl 99

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oh that was fun now let's do it all over again with mx4

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here we go wow yep okay the intent was to use a

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thermal compound that's a lot thinner and mission freaking accomplished there

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here we go

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okay

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okay here we go last one

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whoa

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three four

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five wow

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the beer actually performed

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shockingly well with mx4 okay let's get

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all the other results out here and do the whole roundup then so for a thin

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compound like mx4 freaking almost everything

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worked astonishingly okay well that's isopropyl 99 we expected that to work

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but vodka clean vinegar okay we got a couple little

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flecks there but basically clean beer beer worked

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hand sanitizer windex

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everything's got just like you know what we would consider a negligible okay coke

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didn't work especially well but arc to clean absolutely flawless that one looks

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great here nail polish remover perfect

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distilled water sheesh hydrogen peroxide perfect that

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was an epic fail first time around 70 isopropyl looking pretty good

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even orange juice worked what

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leading us to coke which also

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worked so the obvious question here then is what could possibly go wrong while

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removing a thin compound like mx4 and let me show you

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you can pull the CPU out of the socket when you go to lift the heat sink off

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i had just done another mount so that i could

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what is that

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1800x oh terrible okay

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anyway the point is i had done a final one so i could do a live demo of how

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while what we've discovered is that some household agents would work to remove

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thermal compound another perfectly viable method in a pinch is straight up

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elbow grease so here's one two three

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four five of those and a coffee filter

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and there's really not a whole lot left

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so there you have it guys how to remove thermal compound everything from

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super sensible ways all the way to stuff that makes no sense whatsoever and how

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well they all worked thank you for

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watching and please pray for our 1800x

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is always so confusing to me when i'm at the supermarket and i see people

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spending way too much on shaving cartridges no no dollar shave club is

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Linus and give them a try today we'll have that linked down below

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so thanks again for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit

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the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured in the video

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description as a summary uh if you're going for thermal compound removal we're

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thinking maybe the isopropyl alcohol or

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the goo gone or arc to clean if you're just like a mad baller and you like to

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you know whatever spend a lot of money on removing thermal compound uh also

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down there you'll find a link to our t-shirt store as well as a link to our

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community forum which you should totally join you can go talk tech including how

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stupid this test was right over there