Okay, the stubborn here managed to remove all the thermal compound from his GPU, just before he realized that he had no other compounds lying around. Yeah, I ended up with a very hot GTX 580 on a very hot spring day (like really hot, 33ºC/91ºF) with no thermal compound. The GPU have a (shame on me) air cooling system. Recipe for a disaster. Well, after that I bought a Noctua NTH1 thermal compound online. It is going to take a while for it to arrive (about 4~5 days). I tried to use the computer with the poorly cooled GTX 580. 55ºC idle, 96ºC on 60% load, no OC. I didn't even tried 100% load, as it would have probably set to whole thing on fire and burnt my house, neighbors and probably the entire city on a very dramatic incident that would resemble a hydrogen bomb. I spent some time Googling on substitutes for the compound, and I found that aluminum foil would do the job quite poorly. I tried, and it managed to cool things down a little bit, but...Well, what about mineral oil? Would it perform okay for the next 5 days on regular load? Would it work better than aluminum foil? I also found something about silicon grease. I'm not sure about it though. How would it perform? Any other ideas?
Now let's move to general questions about heat:
While googling on thermal compounds, I came across people discussing if ethanol would do a better job on water cooling than water itself. Apparently the answer is no, because of something called heat capacity. I know that water have a high heat capacity, meaning (correct if I am wrong) that you would have to apply a large amount of energy to make the water's temperature rise in comparison with ethanol. But I don't get it: That means that ethanol absorves heat more easily than water, therefore it was supposed to perform better as fluid for a liquid cooling system, right? Can some one clarify that for me?
Edited by Guizin239 - 10/29/12 at 9:01am
Now let's move to general questions about heat:
While googling on thermal compounds, I came across people discussing if ethanol would do a better job on water cooling than water itself. Apparently the answer is no, because of something called heat capacity. I know that water have a high heat capacity, meaning (correct if I am wrong) that you would have to apply a large amount of energy to make the water's temperature rise in comparison with ethanol. But I don't get it: That means that ethanol absorves heat more easily than water, therefore it was supposed to perform better as fluid for a liquid cooling system, right? Can some one clarify that for me?
Edited by Guizin239 - 10/29/12 at 9:01am
