CMT 7100 CPU Upgrade

[theos911]

Well, I was hoping the prices of 672s would come down a bit, but after 6 months they remain unchanged. So, I went ahead and got a 670.

I'll keep everybody posted.

Any recomendations on thermal grease?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Most folks recommend Arctic Silver 5

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100007

You gotta be real careful not to glob too much of it on there though, or if it oozes down the side of the processor and gets into the motherboard contacts, POOF!

I fried the motherboard of a HP d510 that way once.

'Cuz not only does it have great thermal conductivity, unfortunately it has great electrical conductivity too.

Chickens like me use the Arctic Silver Céramique.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100017

Paul

[theos911]

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Paul_Tikkanen wrote:

I fried the motherboard of a HP d510 that way once.

---

It wasn't arctic silver, but I fried The CPU Daughtercard, Logic Board, and PSU of 2002 Powermac G4 Quicksilver (Dual 1 GHz PowerPC 7455) all in one fall swoop by doing that. That was a bad day...

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're not kidding that was a bad day.

I was feeling insufferably pleased with myself on how much faster my d510 was working with a P4 2.66/533 Ghz processor, which I installed to replace a P4 2.0/400 processor.

I was surfing the net and all of a sudden, the PC just shut down instantly.

I tried a few things to no avail, and when I surmised that I must have done something wrong with the processor, when I removed the heat sink, there was silver paste all down the side of the processor, and when I removed it, I could see that some got into the motherboard contacts.

Game over.

[theos911]

Luckily for me, the mac wasn't a mission critical system. In fact, dad actually got it free through work. (Apparently "they don't use macs', but for some reason someone bought one. It got used for a secretary for a while, but none of the IT guys knew Mac OS X so it was scrapped. Dad worked maintenance and had first dibs on scraps soooo... we got an almost new top of the line macintosh. It had an overheating issue and me being an oh-so intelligent 13 year old at the time said "I'll fix it!". Yah... that didn't go so well...)

I went ahead and bought a tube of ceramique 2.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

We are both older and wiser now. 

Good luck with the upgrade, and do let us know the results.

Regards,

Paul

[theos911]

The CPU arrived about two weeks ago. I installed it and it has been solid for the whole time. The new grease has system temperatures a good bit lower.

Since this upgrade was merely a clock rate increase and not a jump to a newer arch (like Core or i), most things feel about the same, but 1080P does play smoothly now (did not before). Audio and Video encoding also got a nice boost as well as batch photo resizing. No noticeable performance increase in the one game that I play, but that wasn't really the point of this upgrade.

Overall, I'm quite happy with it. Thanks!

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

This is good news to read.

Thanks for following up.

Enjoy!

Best regards,

Paul

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I thought you might enjoy this thread I participated in on the HP Business Support Forum.

The P4 672 works in the dc7100, and so does VT.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Deskpro-EVO/dc7100-CPU-upgrade/m-p/5719755#M93099

Best regards,

Paul

[theos911]

Excellent, Thanks for the heads up! If I ever come across a 672 for cheap, I'll try it out.

If only this conclusion was reached about six weeks earlier... :/