The consistency feels about the same to me.

I ended up using dumbells to smash and glue the IHS back onto the Opteron 185. The CPU has two layers of anti-static foam under the pins, and one ontop of the IHS to level out the weight. The RTV is just some inexpensive Permatex gasket maker you can get at any auto parts store. I let it sit for 24 hrs before re-installing the CPU.

I used Arctic Cooling's MX4 thermal paste product under the IHS and between the IHS and the Zalman heatsink/fan. The stuff is fairly watery compared to what I've used before so it smashes down pretty easily.

Because of how the Zalman needed to be oriented, I decided to disconnect the rear case exhaust fan, but left the front intake fan connected. Seems like the two fans would be fighting each other.

At full load (HD youtube videos + Windows updates running), the CPU won't go above 54 C. The heatsink doesn't even feel hot either. I'm running the Zalman fan at 11 V instead of 12 V. I could probably run it even slower.

This pretty much completes the objective of this thread. Thanks to everyone for their advice. I don't know how much the MX4 helped under the IHS helped compared to the branded heatsink/fan. With Ceramique 2 under the IHS and the old fan, I was at 72 C. Perhaps the MX4 dropped it another 4 C and the Zalman another 14 C?

Being curious, I decided to recheck my previous economy heatsink/cooler setup with the re-capped Opteron 185 and compare it against the Zalman.

With my eBay-special-deal economy heatsink/cooler, I record 71 C at full load after 10 minutes playback. This is with a front intake and rear case exhaust fan. CPU fan running at 2400 rpm.

With the Zalman, I record 54 C at full load after 10 minutes playback. This is with only the rear exhaust case fan and the CPU fan running at 1800 rpm. The difference is a massive 17 C.

According to CPU-World, the max operating temp for the Opteron 185 is 65 C, so the special-buy heatsink/fan isn't the best option if constantly running the CPU at full load.

For pushing the CPU, I open Chromium and Firefox and let each browser run 1080p HD videos simultaneously.

Yes, this copper Zalman with 3 heat pipes can get some real job done. I think it's even more powerful than my Zalman CNPS7500-Cu which isn't a toy cooler either.

I can turn the fan's RPM all the way down to around 1200 RPM and the CPU temp doesn't increase. At full load, I put my hand on the copper coils and they aren't even warm. I feel like the Zalman is performing some kind of magic.

I'd like to resurrect this thread and mention that I have an Opteron 180 that is hitting 100C with a Scythe Ninja on it. Scythe Ninja should be overkill so I suspect the 180's IHS paste has gone bad/flowed out or there is something funky going on with temperature readings. I tried an overclocked Opteron 165 as a test and that is maxing out at 41C CPU (cores showing 53/57C) in Prime95 In-Place testing.

What does the Opteron 180 get to after 10 minutes of idle?

De-lidding / re-lidding saved my Opteron 185.

EDIT: Should the system hang before it gets to 100 C? Mine would hang at about 80 C.

Yeah I just did the delid / relid too and that fixed the temps. It's staying in the temp range of the Opteron 165 now.

The main thing that brought this to my attention was sudden system shutdowns. Strangely when I tried Prime95 it quickly went to 100C and didn't shutdown. 😀 Maybe the shutdown temp is even higher than that. There weren't any freezes, just it shutting off completely.

Yeah, sudden system shutdowns were also my symptoms. It came on all of a sudden.

In the course of 1 hour you did the full relidding? The RTV I used took at least 24-hrs to dry. And I think it took me a good hour just to get the lid off carefully.

feipoa wrote:

Yeah, sudden system shutdowns were also my symptoms. It came on all of a sudden.

In the course of 1 hour you did the full relidding? The RTV I used took at least 24-hrs to dry. And I think it took me a good hour just to get the lid off carefully.

I've done a few deliddings before so I knew how to go about that. I didn't bother with glueing the IHS back in place before testing it. I didn't want to put that much effort in without knowing if there was something else wrong with it. The heatsink held the IHS place well enough. I'm going to RTV it later now that I've seen it is effective.

A nice thing about delidding/relidding Intel CPUs on LGA 775 and later is their socket mechanism locks down onto the IHS. It can't move and so you really don't need to glue it on again.

I wonder why the Opteron 180/185 TIM has failed so completely. I haven't seen that with any other CPUs.

My best guess is that the heat transfer compound used on these particular series of CPUs was more prone to degradation with time. But why more so than others? Perhaps AMD realised the heat generation potential of these chips and used a compound with greater thermal transfer properties at the expense of reduced longevity. Or they used the same heat compound, but the added heat from these faster chips reduced the compound's service life. Or perhaps the faster chips stayed in service longer because they had better performance. Whatever the reason, at least there is a solution.

swaaye wrote:

I wonder why the Opteron 180/185 TIM has failed so completely. I haven't seen that with any other CPUs.

This thermal compound isn't supposed to last so long like 10+ years under 100W+ TDP. I have a few Northwoods which have used to do at least 3.5GHz in the past, but they don't do any more. Their temps look not so good. I guess it's liquid metal time.

How long should liquid metal last on an Opteron 185 in comparison to what was on the Opteron from the factory?

LM doesn't infiltrate nickel plated copper over time. Neither silicon dioxide of the processor core. Makes me think there is no expiration date for LM there.