can arctic silver when applied between the pill & heatsink create the potential for a short ? I applied some to my sipik sk68 about a match heads worth and noticed a bit worked its way up through the groves on either side of the pill and settled around the + - leads will this be ok ?
btw the paste I used is just labeled "arctic silver" Not arctic silver 5
Not Electrically Conductive: Arctic Silver 5 was formulated to conduct heat, not electricity.
(While much safer than electrically conductive silver and copper greases, Arctic Silver 5 should be kept away from electrical traces, pins, and leads. While it is not
electrically conductive, the compound is very slightly capacitive and could potentially cause problems if it bridges two close-proximity electrical path
If i recall properly the first arctis silver was highly hyped to be conductive. Apparantly it was, but needed hardly achievable pressure to act as an conductor. Sorry for being unable to confribute more. However using generic "white" thermal paste would hardly be less effective than that and safer. Arcti would be best if you get the thermal glue, just for paste i would not bother.
yeah thats right its up around the positive wire , well I spose I will find out in time either way , I had the paste for bout 5 years brought it for cpu change , read were most choose to use it so I thought why not if it improves heat sinking its helpfull
Arctic Cooling's MX range is better that Arctic Silver and no electrical conductivity whatsoever. The big difference between AS5 and AC MX is that no curing time is needed with MX. AS5 can take a couple of weeks to gain maximum effect whereas AC MX is from day one. The only real difference between AC MX4 and AC MX2 is that MX4 is a little easier to spread. I never tried AC's Glue but on AC's track record I'd expect it to be excellent.
From what I understand, if it's ceramic based you should be fine (not conductive, like aforementioned MX stuff). Arctic Silver 5 (and some of their other products) actually has silver in it thus leading to potential electrical conductivity. There are also some carbon particle or nanotube based compounds out there that can also have electrical conductivity, but less so than metals.
There's more than you need to know about thermal compounds at benchmark reviews where they tested 80 of them in 2009. If yours is on the list it will tell you what kind of compound it is.
The point I was trying to make is that AS5 and the MX range are equivalent but that the MX range has benefits. All comparisons of the two compounds (typically under a CPU heatsink) are usually conducted after each has had the recommended curing time. AS5's time is 200 hours of use on top of a hot cpu. The MX range needs no curing time and reaches its maximum instantly. Having used both extensively when overclocking PC's I have seen this myself. I have no idea how long AS5 curing would take in a flashlight to reach maximum effect. But it is reasonable to assume AS5 will take tens of hours, at least, of hot use. So IMHO MX therefore seems the better choice for flashlights (i.e. just as good thermal conductivity but immediately).
There speaks a man who has never been into overclocking cpu's to the extreme...... But TBH I don't think the odd one or two degrees will matter much in a flashlight either way so its all purely academic.
thanks for the links and info . I think the paste I used is prefectly ok ..I happened to get the price tag that was covering the tube removed enough to find it reads
Céramique Arctic Silver
looks like it does the exact oppisite
Electrical Insulator: Céramique does not contain any metal or other electrically conductive materials. It is a pure electrical insulator, neither electrically conductive nor capacitive. http://www.arcticsilver.com/ceramique.htm
I do have the watercooling gear in my garage :) (I actually planned out an evaporative column cooling setup but never got around to finishing it like a lot of things in life), but I eventually got tired of running computers that aren't entirely stable so I just buy dells now. During one hot summer I had a machine that was just set up on a chair, and the HD failed because someone knocked over the fan pointed at it. Good times.
Once, way back when, I went on a tour of the excite@home datacenter. Remember them? Well, it turned out their equipment usage grew much faster than their a/c capacity. The datacenter was HOT. probably 120 degrees. You couldn't be in it for more than a few minutes. Almost every rack had its front cover open, with a variety of floor fans aimed in. 1 in 20 servers or so had the little wrench light lit...
I used to be big into PC's and modding them a few years back, I even did evaporative cooling also.
Back at that time Arctic Silver was well known to kill AMD CPU's as they had contacts on top of the organic board the cpu sits on and you could short or open the circuit to help access multipliers within the processor. Many people who didn't overclock would put arctic silver on their cpu like peanut butter and it would short out the top of those contacts on the organic board and fry the cpu.
The same applies to Arctic Silver adhesive also, I use their ceramic version so i don't have to worry about it.
In those cases just static electricity can kill a cpu even today, But i do have my doubts it could conduct alot of voltage if thats a worry.
But TBH I don't think the odd one or two degrees will matter much in a flashlight either way so its all purely academic.