New heat grease, no help

[Mark Kirkwood]

Karl F. Larsen wrote:
>     I have to keep my Ubuntu set for Zero Appearance effects. If I set 
> it to normal my system works pretty good until I use Google. It has so 
> many color effects it heats up the video chip and my screen displays a 
> funny cross-hatch pattern and it kills the keyboard and mouse.
>
>     Today I bought a tube of high temp grease and I took off the heat 
> sink and cleaned it all up with alcohol and then put a liberal amount on 
> the top of the chip and put the heat sink back on.  Alas it does not 
> improve performance one bit :-)
>
>
>   
Going against the trend on this one, I'm gonna try to provide helpful 
advice :-)...

Karl, from what you wrote it sounds like you renewed the grease on your 
video card heat sink, right? Maybe do your cpu one as well (tho check 
the sort of grease is suitable for both), and blow the dust off the 
heatsink before reinstalling. A word on what to do after you are all 
"re-greased" as it were - some types of thermal paste need several heat 
up/cool down cycles before they work at their rated heat conducting 
level, so if you normally leave your machine on overnight - turn it off 
in the evening for a week or so to let it cool down overnight.

I use Arctic Silver thermal paste on my machines, after the procedure 
described above I can switch my (single) case fan to silent mode, run 
the video card (Radeon 9600 pro) with a Zalman fanless heatsink and have 
no heat problems (it is summer where I live in New Zealand). The cpu is 
an AMD64X2 3800+.

Cheers

Mark