Microscopy and material testing
First, I simply remove the paste on the glass slide with the spatula. The result is clear and was to be expected in this form. We see an almost beautifully oily nose formation on the wiped off material, which then dries completely as an almost pure liquid after a few minutes and can no longer be smeared by the finger.
This of course calls for a higher resolution, which I have also done:
And now let’s look at another image of a homogeneous surface in the middle of the smear and analyze what floats on top as a layer of fat, so to speak, like on a good chicken broth. Particles between 5 and 8 µm are actually just ok, you could live with that, but…
… that’s not the whole truth, because it’s ON the paste and not IN it. That’s why I simply vaporized the top layer as a plasma with the laser at minimum power to take a look inside. And well, it’s best to see for yourself:
Particles up to 16 µm are beyond reasonable! For cost reasons, very large particles of aluminum oxide have simply been added to the fluffy paste. The trick is to achieve higher thermal conductivity very easily and cost-effectively, because the many layers with the additional heat transfer resistance between the particles and the silicone are eliminated. The only stupid thing is that these large particles also act as a kind of larger spacer between which the silicone oil can then simply run through and out together with the fine zinc particles. This is a kind of self-dissolution with an announcement. The very cheap silicone oil used would certainly result in a material price of well under 2.50 USD. So per kilo, not per gram!
With the quantities of paste that are used by a board partner every month, it is certainly much cheaper, especially as the margins here are likely to be astronomically high. Of course, the graphics card manufacturers also benefit from this, which is why my sympathy is very limited. Nobody can claim that they didn’t know, because you could have guessed it from the price alone – in fact, you should have! And what exactly is inside? In addition to the vast quantities of mostly coarsely ground aluminum oxide (Al2O3) and a lot of silicone oil (silicon, hydrogen, oxygen), we also have some finer zinc oxide (ZnO) as a cheap filler material. I can’t find any carbon that might have suggested a more sophisticated silicone (side chains). So it really is just the simplest oil.
Conclusion and summary
With such minimalist grinding grades, the paste simply MUST degrade and dissolve in a short time. This is a deliberately and cheaply cobbled together concoction with a built-in decay time of only a few months. I can’t understand why a graphics card manufacturer would do this to itself (and several have bought this crap). The rejection of RMA requests due to excessively high hotspot temperatures (up to 115 °C would be “normal”) is also downright cheeky towards customers. I simply have to put it so harshly, because the prices charged for such cards actually suggest quality. Except that this is not even remotely delivered here! If you just look at the tear-off image of the paste with all the drops and bubbles after the test, you get downright sick:
I can only advise every manufacturer to settle the reported damage in their own interest and to send the known paste offender to hell with a vengeance. This is simply no way to treat the customers. It is sad that no one has noticed this so far, although the number of cases has increased significantly and many buyers are certainly not even aware of the ticking time bombs they have in their computers. The paste used has been designed solely to achieve the highest possible test values as cheaply as possible for short periods of time. Durability is a completely different issue here, and nobody was interested in it.
For everyone, here’s a quick run-through with a personal address as a video:
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