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Serious question, did you guys clean thermal paste with alcohol or just dry wipe back in the day?
I started at a shop in Reno around 2003 and we had one bottle of 91% isopropyl for the whole bench, so most techs just dry wiped and moved on, which meant half our re-pastes came back running hot within 6 months. I finally bought my own bottle for $3 and started doing it right, and my repeat repairs basically dried up, which my boss noticed but never asked why. Anyone else remember being told to skip the cleaning step to save time, or was that just my shop?
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amy_murphy8510d ago
Remembered the time our shop got a batch of refurbed Dells and every single one came back with heat issues. Turns out the guy who set them up was slapping new paste on top of the old crusty stuff without wiping anything. That crust acts like a bad layer between the chip and the sink, so temps creep up over time, not right away. Julia's not wrong that a bad mount can do the same thing, but old dried paste is its own problem and it stacks on top of the other stuff. We ended up redoing all forty of those machines and the comebacks stopped cold.
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julia_lee10d ago
Sounds like you're reading a lot into a bottle of alcohol. Half your re-pastes coming back hot probably had more to do with bad mounts or cheap paste than a dry wipe. A little leftover paste on the die isn't gonna tank temps like that.
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