News: 1621516014

... a knee-jerk reaction from a legal-eagle with absolutely no technical understanding.

Or a CSR who didn't know the answer and couldn't bothered to find out so just came up with what may well be a stock answer.

Wait until somebody else claims to have used a thermal pad of the same size before ASUS.

Since the size of a thermal pad is such a vital bit of IP the penalties against ASUS for stealing this must be huge.

Rossmann further points out that under US law, simply opening the computer case does not void the warranty, as implied by Asus. Very big PR mistake by Asus.

Actually a rather small PR mistake. To be a very big one would require that more than 0.01% of the purchasers of their products actually gave a flying fuck whether or not they were allowed to open the case.

Remember, when it comes to consumer IT products, the likes of us are the small minority and the vast majority of purchasers' knowledge of maintenance is at the level of; "Ugh, hit with rock", if they can be bothered at all.

Just been through this with an old Compaq laptop I refurbished as a spare. CPU was easy to deal with but the GPU pad was dust and could I hell find out what size it should be, so just figured out the width and bashed some copper shim in there with paste both sides.

Seems like he could have just tried a pad with paste on both sides. Tighten the heatsink down to specs, then remove it. If there's paste on the chip and on the heatsink, and a slight indentation on the pad, it should be good. Might want to toss the test pad and start over with a new pad to be permanent.

I apologize if this suggestion seems too sensible.

Recently crypto miners have been dumping RX 580 8GB of various flavours on ebay. £60-£65 so I have been tempted to take a punt on one at that price (have to rely on my 2400G otherwise). Replacing the thermal paste is easy but I cannot find reliable information on the thermal pads anywhere. Even in forums, people who have the cards can't agree on what thickness the thermal pads are or what thickness they should be replaced with. Some people recommend different thickness from different manufactures for the same card. We are talking generally 1mm, 1.5mm and 5mm so the differences aren't necessarly small ones. The choice I am left with is the one you recommend, buy three pads and waste two as I can't find reliable information from the manufacturer or anyone else for that matter. Just hope if I do take the plunge that the people who say 2.5mm thick pads have been used aren't true as they are harder to get a hold off because I live in N.Ireland, it's simply impossible to source some things if you can't buy locally (thanks Brexit).

I do try to base my decision on attitude towards customers.

All my smartphones (both) have been ASUS, Having a rethink when the current one collapses. But I doubt whether there is much choice.

One company whose attitude never came into the picture was Nokia, used their tank until I was forced to use a smartphone.

Used it for nine years, had exactly one LOCAL SHOP REPAIRABLE problem.

...be to classify its answer as "confidential" too and sue the poor user for going public?

Yes.

"Our legal strategy is proprietary information. Prepare to hear from our lawyers"

- ASUS

ASUS wants you to buy a new Laptop/PC.

Simples.

I didn't realise pads were really widely used. I've got sausage fingers and even I can clean a CPU with a bit of bogroll and then apply a bit of paste.

I wonder. My mother had an ASUS laptop that overheated. I tried cleaning (easy enough) and applying thermal paste (similarly straightforward). But getting the (censored, too profane even for El Reg) heat sink in place without forming bubbles was maddeningly difficult. Don't remember exactly what obstructed what, but I never did get it exactly right and the laptop still runs hotter than one would wish.

Perhaps the thermal pads would offer a solution. And should note that this was my only experience with an overheating laptop. Even though it wasn't Apple hardware, it could be I was holding something wrong.

Louis Rossman put up another video on Youtube this morning. It seems that a viewer put up a link to Rossmann's ASUS video on Facebook and "someone" didn't like it very much. A few complaints about "abusive content" later and the link was blocked. Rossmann doesn't have a Facebook account but learned about the block from a few of his viewers.

replacing thermal pads because they 'age' ... total and utter nonsense !

Do they leak an oily substance ? yes, some do.

Does it matter ? no, not a bit.

Thermal pads or thermal grease is an emulsion made from alumina (aluminum oxide) suspended in a carrier material.

The thermal properties are determined by the alumina. The rest is just a carrier to be able to manipulate it.

You only need very little paste. Heaping it on works aversely. It is not a refrigerant. It's a transfer material. One that has worse properties than then materials it is trying to transfer between. Yes, you read that right. The heatsink and the copper slug on the device have much better thermal properties than the alumina.

Why do you need it then ? because, at microscopic level, neither the heatsink nor the heatslug on the device (processor,gpu) are 'flat'. They contain pits. The thermal compound fills these potholes and lowers the thermal resistance. When the device goes hot for the first time the "oil" goes fluid , the alumina particles settle under pressure and that's it. Components mounted on a heatsink where paste is used will always be mounted "spring loaded", either by special retaining clips made from spring steel, or using split-washers under the screw, or the heatsink itself spring loaded. the reason is what i came to mention before : at first operation of the assembly, the first time this stuff gets hot, the oily carrier goes liquid , squeezes out, while the alumina particles remain trapped. the carrier material is a very bad thermal conductor, you want it out of there.

The same nonsense goes for statements like "this paste is totally dried out , let me replace it".

It MUST be dried out ! That's when it is most effective.

Aluminum has a thermal conductivity of 230-ish watts per metre-kelvin

Alumina is 30 ...

Copper is 401

Oil is 0.1

Now you get it why you want that oil out of there ?

As for the thermal pads : they need to be compressed for the same reason : get the carrier out of there and compress the TIM ( thermal interface material )

There is a tendency to go away from alumina based materials and go to carbon based material ( a material called Vertical Carbon ) or graphite.

Carbon, under certain circumstances, is a much better thermal conductor than most other materials out there. Diamond, which is the crystalline form of carbon, can handle 2000 watts per metre-kelvin. Nothing else comes close to that apart from graphite. There are some exotic materials such as magnesium oxide, boron nitride and aluminum nitride that perform very good. Some of these are actually used inside the semiconductor package.

And yes, you can actually buy thermal paste that uses , industrial, diamond . It is used in cooling applications for high performance lasers and processor modules like for IBM Z-series mainframes.

Convincing post. Sounds like you know what you are talking about. Did you come to this site by mistake?

All good assuming there are no thermal or mechanical forces which might move the heatsink and the cooled component even a small amount relative to each other...

The space shuttle booster was perfectly sealed by the rubber O rings, until it was cold and the o ring couldn't move to keep the seal against the vibration of launch.

Yes, the vibrations there are massive, but thermal cycling and differential expansion has a good chance of gently moving things against each other, that's where having the flexibility of a relatively new pad would be wanted.

It's not something I've ever really looked at, I can't recall having used a thermal pad in several decades...