I need to clean old thermal grease off of a heatsink I am reusing.
Is 70% rubbing alcohol fine, or should I get something more concentrated?
Is 70% rubbing alcohol fine, or should I get something more concentrated?
Well, I, for one simply rub it well with a piece of paper. Alcohol will make it cleaner, but it's by no means neccesary. Unless it's some super-sticky paste, that is.
The idea of any hi-fi system is to reproduce the source material as faithfully as possible, and to deliberately add distortion to everything you hear (due to amplifier deficiencies) because it sounds 'nice' is simply not high fidelity. If that is what you want to hear then there is no problem with that, but by adding so much additional material (by way of harmonics and intermodulation) you have a tailored sound system, not a hi-fi. - Rod Elliot, ESP
You could just rub it off with a piece of cloth or something, it's not that big of a deal unless you have a lot of excess.
70% is fine. If you have a razor, you can use that to help scrape off the paste.
That's not a good idea with heatsinks.trippy982 wrote:
70% is fine. If you have a razor, you can use that to help scrape off the paste.
Heatsinks are manufactured to have surfaces as smooth as possible, and scraping them with something like a razor or the tip of a screwdriver is going to leave marks. The paste is supposed to fill out imperfections, but the more imperfections there are on the surface, the less efficient the heatsink be as a heat conduit.