okay so you ask anyone on the internet what's the best thermal compound what's
the best way to apply it to get a thousand different answers because
there's everything from garbage like this all the way up to high-end
compounds full of silver and and diamonds and all kinds of that crap
but what everybody seems to pretty much agree on is how to remove it
grab some 99 isopropyl alcohol got like
tricks slap that on your CPU and bam thermal
compound's gone but we thought to ourselves you know what
conventional wisdom's not good enough for us so we got you guys 15 different
solvents to find out which one truly
removes thermal compound better than anything else
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okay so you're probably thinking to yourself come on Linus the reason we
don't debate this is we already know the
best way to remove thermal compound but picture this okay
it's late at night you got the big match tomorrow you're
building up your rig you're ready to go except oh
no there's no solvent it turns out earlier
in the day little johnny took all the rubbing
alcohol poured it all over his skinned knee and now you've got nothing left so
you're rummaging around in the kitchen the pantry the bathroom and you come
together with a list of stuff that looks
a little something like this we've got 100
orange juice we've got beer we've got distilled water goo gone vinegar more
beer windex hydrogen peroxide absolute
vodka vodka whatever you know what it is we've got
nail polish remover alcohol-based hand sanitizer coke isopropyl at 70 and 99
concentrations and finally arctic silver's fancy expensive arctic
clean surface preparation and we're going to be testing each of them on the
two major types of thermal compounds the more runny kind and the more kind of
particulate kind okay so we're going to start with icy diamond and the
methodology is pretty simple we take the thermal compound we go
and with a clean CPU and heatsink we apply the usual grain of rice sized boop
there you go and slap our nhu 12s cooler on top of it
once it's screwed in all the way we give it the old wiggle to make sure it's uh
fully spread out and leave it for a minute or two
then we take off the cooler you can see how this is gonna get pretty old pretty
fast and there we have it a dirty CPU
now the original plan was to take our solvents and kind of
uh dump them onto the CPU and then we
realized oh yeah that's uh that's probably gonna make a bit of a mess hold
on so as a compromise we settled on using the heatsink
as our test surface with the thermal compound smear covered
we left each one for 60 to 120 seconds
to allow the solvent to do its work after the waiting period
we wiped each one five times without applying too much
force we're evaluating how well the solvent
works not how hard we can press down on a
heatsink then to test we take something very clean very fine
so a coffee filter in this case
wipe it off and boom
that is how we collect our results for each solvent on each type of compound
okay we are done
screwdrivers down and we have the results okay most of them
are not very surprising but some of them are
basically here's how the grading works if there's anything on the coffee filter
that's a fail so hydrogen peroxide i was expecting another topical sanitizer to
do well no not so much beer
epic fail almost all of it stayed on the
heatsink windex this one performed
okay it did leave a significant residue
though so we'll call that a c minus hand sanitizer so it is an alcohol-based
sanitizer and this actually performed really well so there's at least one
household item that would work quite well distilled water was actually
the worst not good for cleaning off your CPU
goo gone though excellent result here we've got almost i
would say nothing on our coffee filter
arc to clean i mean this is a purpose designed uh cleaner so this one
performed perfectly as well and nail polish remover
this one came in really well remember this is an acetone based one though i
wouldn't expect the same results from a regular one
vodka okay guys so if you gotta clean
your CPU with alcohol go with the vodka
not with the beer here's our isopropyl alcohol i think
we've put an end once and for all to the debate
70 versus 99 we're going with doesn't frickin matter
coke was basically tied with water and
you get kind of a urine stain looking thing on your uh
on your paper towel and the same goes with orange juice except even more urine
finally we've got vinegar which worked actually
much worse than i expected barely removing any of it and finally the
golden standard isopropyl 99
oh that was fun now let's do it all over again with mx4
here we go wow yep okay the intent was to use a
thermal compound that's a lot thinner and mission freaking accomplished there
here we go
okay
okay here we go last one
whoa
three four
five wow
the beer actually performed
shockingly well with mx4 okay let's get
all the other results out here and do the whole roundup then so for a thin
compound like mx4 freaking almost everything
worked astonishingly okay well that's isopropyl 99 we expected that to work
but vodka clean vinegar okay we got a couple little
flecks there but basically clean beer beer worked
hand sanitizer windex
everything's got just like you know what we would consider a negligible okay coke
didn't work especially well but arc to clean absolutely flawless that one looks
great here nail polish remover perfect
distilled water sheesh hydrogen peroxide perfect that
was an epic fail first time around 70 isopropyl looking pretty good
even orange juice worked what
leading us to coke which also
worked so the obvious question here then is what could possibly go wrong while
removing a thin compound like mx4 and let me show you
you can pull the CPU out of the socket when you go to lift the heat sink off
i had just done another mount so that i could
what is that
1800x oh terrible okay
anyway the point is i had done a final one so i could do a live demo of how
while what we've discovered is that some household agents would work to remove
thermal compound another perfectly viable method in a pinch is straight up
elbow grease so here's one two three
four five of those and a coffee filter
and there's really not a whole lot left
so there you have it guys how to remove thermal compound everything from
super sensible ways all the way to stuff that makes no sense whatsoever and how
well they all worked thank you for
watching and please pray for our 1800x
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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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description as a summary uh if you're going for thermal compound removal we're
thinking maybe the isopropyl alcohol or
the goo gone or arc to clean if you're just like a mad baller and you like to
you know whatever spend a lot of money on removing thermal compound uh also
down there you'll find a link to our t-shirt store as well as a link to our
community forum which you should totally join you can go talk tech including how
stupid this test was right over there