Saturday, February 23, 2013

Heat Sink Material

If you are like me, you likely have no idea what the title of this post even means... however as of today I know exactly what it is and how important it is to keeping your computer from overheating.

I play World of Warcraft a bit, and after the Pandaria update, my computer fan starting running full bore LOUD all the time.  Upon doing a hardware/software check to find out what the problem was, apparently my computer's integrated Intel i5-2310 chip did not have the capacity to handle the graphics necessary for the most up to date WoW content.

So, for Christmas, belly purchased a GEFORCE GTX 650 dedicated graphics card for me.  I kept putting off installing it, I guess because I've never really opened up a computer and messed all that much with hardware, so I was a bit fearful of trying it.  So getting to it, I made a bit of a mistake and removed the fan from the CPU, because I thought the card had to be installed by going in at an angle from the top.  I found out of course that you have to unscrew a piece of the back panel and unclip the front, then it just slides in from the side.

So I got it installed, the reinstalled the fan assembly, figured out the BIOS settings to run the new graphics card, and fired everything up.  I put the settings on the graphics card to "High", but almost immediately the computer began running north of 90 degrees centigrade.  Even setting the graphics card to lower settings didn't keep the computer any cooler.

Now you have to understand, I have never, as stated above, worked with computer hardware before, and I did a bunch of research to try and find out why this computer was overheating, when the entire point of installing the dedicated graphics card was to allow it to run cooler.  I couldn't seem to find anything related to my brand of computer doing this sort of thing, but then I ran into an article that talked about the importance of using heat sink, otherwise known as thermal grease, or liquid heat exchanger.  

The basic principle is that there are two plates that stick together, and in order to pull the heat from the CPU plate, the thermal grease will transfer that heat over to the fan and radiator fins.  When I pulled the fan off of my computer originally, I accidentally rubbed off a bunch of the compound, and that's why after I installed it, it was loose on its mounting, and why the computer ran hot as hell even with the dedicated graphics card.

I picked up a 20 dollar gaming fan, figured I'd upgrade the fan, along with some new thermal grease, and installed everything tonite.  I do have to say, Intel's mounting pins are a total pain in the ass, they don't like to stay in place as you try and twist the locking mechanisms into place.  I got everything put in, then fired the computer up.  SO much quieter, and running a full 40 degrees cooler. 

I now have the WoW graphics settings at maximum "Ultra" setting, which is pretty freaking amazing by comparison to the "Fair" settings I was running before.  My whole purpose for getting the graphics card was to quiet things down, because the cpu fan was running full bore non stop and was annoyingly loud.  Now the computer is really quiet, and the graphics are insanely good.  I have to say also, belly enjoys working on computer hardware, and I think it is a lot like working on a car to be honest.  I think the wife would really do well if she were an auto mechanic, although she's probably beg to differ :)

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