Removing heat sink paste from processors

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starzfan0211

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
Messages
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Location
Arlington, Tx
I looked and searched but could not find. Anybody have a quick and easy way to remove the goo off of the processors leftover from the heatsinks? Will acetone do it without damage? I am probably going to sell these and want to clean them up. No time to process right now. Thanks!
 
I use what ever kind of solvent is handy. Lacquer thinner, paint thinner, carburettor cleaner, brake cleaner, alcohol and toluene I have used at one time or another. Safety first. Protect yourself with nitrile gloves and a chemical respirator.

Fix
 
Some thermal paste compounds contain Beryllium Oxide. Be careful of how you dispose of the residue.

MSDS Beryllium Oxide:

http://www.pcl.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/BE/beryllium_oxide.html
 
Does anyone bother saving the thermal paste from processors? Does anyone know what the yield might be?

EDIT: Yield for Silver content.
 
I'm just waiting for my caustic soda pearls to arrive. I have a batch of CPU's that I intend cleaning by boiling in NaOH. I will report back and let you know if it removes the paste.

AuH-R
 
Claudie said:
Does anyone bother saving the thermal paste from processors? Does anyone know what the yield might be?

EDIT: Yield for Silver content.
Click to expand...


I find that the best way to remove & recover the thermal compound from things is to dissolve it in a minimal amount of acetone.

I'm reasonably certain that you can just dissolve most heatpastes in acetone, let the solids settle out, then pour off the liquid and do silver extraction on your remaining solids. If your thermal compound is Arctic Silver or other "high-performance" type, then you may be able to skip refining and melt the solids as they are - Arctic Silver gen 5, for instance, is made with 70% by weight of powdered metallic silver (if memory serves).

The computer company that I work for uses a thermal compound consisting of 10% silver oxide, which is light gray in color. It's branded as "STARS" thermal compound and we get it packaged with components in little 1.5g tubes. I've heard a rumor that Ag2O can be turned into metallic silver by reacting it with H2O2 - although I don't believe that to be true as removing an oxygen atom using an oxidizer just doesn't make sense to me. EDIT: Apparently you just heat it. Wow, that's easy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5FFRnCtqq8

White-colored thermal compound is probably worthless. All the MSDS's I've read for the white-colored stuff say that it's just full of Zinc oxide and other ceramics.
 
It sounds like you know thermal compounds, thanks for sharing the knowledge with me.
 
Claudie said:
It sounds like you know thermal compounds, thanks for sharing the knowledge with me.
Click to expand...

Np :)

I actually came here (today, anyway) looking specifically for info on heatpaste metal recovery. I can't seem to find much on the subject... maybe I'll grab a few tubes of the stuff and try to make my first tutorial video on extracting the silver from it.

I just found this, as well - http://www.overclockers.com/silver-thermal-pastes-buyers-beware/ There's a nice lab report at the bottom of the article with metals contents of a bunch of heat pastes.

Cheers!
 
I haven't found a lot about it on here either, a tutorial sounds like a great idea! I am thinking that most people just wipe it off and toss it to the trash. Any PMs that we can recover, should be recovered, especially if they are easy to get to and not too difficult to refine.
 

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