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emac thermal paste replacement

L

Lololobolosse

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 7, 2021
45
4
I wanted to replace the thermal paste in my emac g4 because i had to take the heatsink off and there is a thermal pad that seems very hard to come off what schould i use to take it off ?
And normal thermal paste is good?

Sorry if my english is bad.
 
Please add a picture. I am not super familiar with emacs but on some computers apple used a thin sheet of aluminum foil coated in some kind of heat transfer compound as the thermal pad. Those are very hard to remove without scratching the heatsink. I usually just put a dab of thermal paste on the processor die and leave the black aluminum piece alone, just put the heatsink back on over the thermal paste. If its a thicker foam/silicone thermal pad you will need to scrape it off and replace it with a thermal pad of the equivalent thickness.
 
16558432828993527320735784655967.jpg

Here it is
 
I wouldn't do that, if it comes with a thermal pad you should use a thermal pad, with a termal paste you can't fill the gap between the heatsink and the processor, and if the thermal pad doesn't come off esasily in one piece or it's desintegrating maybe you should replace it with a new one.

But it doesn't seem that it's a thermal pad mostly that i seen are blue and retain some clue that it's a thermal pad, I see really old thermal paste but I could be wrong.
 
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You will need to remove that pad. I think thermal paste will be fine as a replacement as i do not see that pad filling up much if any space between the processor and the heatsink. Where it touched the processor die seems to be very thin. Apple commonly used thermal pads on their computers i think mostly for ease of assembly. No need to deal with messy thermal paste. To get the pad off try soaking it in alcohol and using a sticker scraper to get it off. Be careful not to scratch the heatsink. There is going to be some of that goop stuck to the processor die as well. You can see where it peeled off. use alcohol and a qtip to get it off the processor die. DO NOT scrape it off with a tool or you might crack the die. If the pad is thick, like .5mm or more where it touches the die you will need a thermal pad. If where it touches the die is like a sheet of paper or thinner thermal paste will do fine.
 
I will do what @mustagcoupe said in this case some isopropyl alcohol or paint remover will do the trick, drop some and let it a couple of minutes. The gap seems to be thin so with thermal paste I guess you're good.
 
IMG_20220621_224222.jpg

Here's a picture of the processor and on the heatsink the thermal pad seems very thin like less than a paper it's only more big at the centor of the processor
 
And were schould i apply the thermal paste did i have to put only a little in the center of the processor ?
 
Yeah, clean both the processor and the heatsink, apply in the middle of the processor and if you want spread it with a plastic card or not and when you put the heatsink back the pressure will spread it.
 
You should use thermal paste. A thermal pad is not a good choice when you can use paste. Thermal pads are less efficent. What apple used in a lot of cases including this application is some kind of hybrid of a very thick paste in the shape of a pad. The only reason they used this instead of paste was for ease of assembly at the factory. Just get some decent thermal paste like artic mx-5. Put a rice grain size drop in the center of the processor die and bolt the heat sink down.
 
mustagcoupe said:
You should use thermal paste. A thermal pad is not a good choice when you can use paste. Thermal pads are less efficent. What apple used in a lot of cases including this application is some kind of hybrid of a very thick paste in the shape of a pad. The only reason they used this instead of paste was for ease of assembly at the factory. Just get some decent thermal paste like artic mx-5. Put a rice grain size drop in the center of the processor die and bolt the heat sink down.
Click to expand...
I have artic mx-4 does it is good ?
 
I am also interested about this argument because my emac G4 1.25 / ATI 9200 overclocked to 1.50 GHz is often plagued by system freezes, to reduce the heat inside the case I have removed the internal HDD using an external USB 2.0 instead (too bad it cannot boot from firewire ports...) hoping the now free HDD grille cage would allow a better ventilation but no luck. I think I can exclude a RAM overheating since I have tried many of them, some also with heatsinks (and some with ECC chip onboard) so the CPU temperature seems to be the main issue. Would, in your experience, a fresh thermal paste be enough to cure the problem?
 
@SnakeCoils I recently have a similar situation but it reside in my SSD, it pass SMART verification in a linux box (disk utility suck in this but you can use smartmontools from macports) so it was an interesting thrubleshot. I always replace the thermal paste every 6 years or so albeit mx4 be advertised to last for 8y. For me those machines are for the fun, there is no money to compare so the care i have the better.

Apple is known for the crappy thermals and the cheap thermal paste used in their products so it's better to change it as soon as possible more if you don't know for how long it's was in there.

I can't tell you if it's your problem but it's one thing to do if you want your machine last.

Can you provide more details? The lockup happens when start doing intensive task?. The overclock had been stable before? (The G4 in my experience are not so good overclocking too far), you have monitoring the cpu heat?
 
NewbiePPC said:
@SnakeCoils
Can you provide more details? The lockup happens when start doing intensive task?. The overclock had been stable before? (The G4 in my experience are not so good overclocking too far), you have monitoring the cpu heat?
Click to expand...

Hello, I am back on this argument because decided to give up with this machine, I really hoped that replacing the old thermal paste with a liquidmetal one could be made some difference but no, it crashes now as before.
The lockup happens either on a simple OSX vanilla installation or a really intensive task like installing QT4 from MacPorts repository that involves recompiling of almost any library which QT4 rely on: this mean leaving the eMac computing for almost a week, night and day. I think that going back to original 1.25 GHz will be the best solution but I am not going to perform the clock downgrade, this will be fun time for the next owner of this machine since I am about to give it away. I have still two MMDs, one overclocked to 1.50 GHz the other on stock 1.42 speed, they proved to be way more robust and stable over time and I think I will stick with them for all my PPC experiments :)
 
SnakeCoils said:
Hello, I am back on this argument because decided to give up with this machine, I really hoped that replacing the old thermal paste with a liquidmetal one could be made some difference but no, it crashes now as before.
The lockup happens either on a simple OSX vanilla installation or a really intensive task like installing QT4 from MacPorts repository that involves recompiling of almost any library which QT4 rely on: this mean leaving the eMac computing for almost a week, night and day. I think that going back to original 1.25 GHz will be the best solution but I am not going to perform the clock downgrade, this will be fun time for the next owner of this machine since I am about to give it away. I have still two MMDs, one overclocked to 1.50 GHz the other on stock 1.42 speed, they proved to be way more robust and stable over time and I think I will stick with them for all my PPC experiments :)
Click to expand...
My emac was unusable because of the capacitor on the motherboard it was always freezing at start up maybe yours have the same problem you schould replace all the capacitor
 
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