 Okay, so you ask anyone on the internet, what's the best thermal compound? What's the best way to apply it? You get a thousand different answers because there's everything from garbage like this all the way up to high-end compounds full of silver and and diamonds and all kinds of that crap But what everybody seems to pretty much agree on is how to remove it Grab some 99% isopropyl alcohol Got like tricks and shit Slap that on your CPU and BAM thermal compounds gone, but we thought to ourselves, you know what? Conventional wisdom is not good enough for us. So we got you guys 15 different solvents to find out which one truly Removes thermal compound better than anything else The RipJaws KM570 mechanical keyboard from G.Skill features full RGB, a simple design, Cherry MX switches and more. Check it out now at the link below Okay, so you're probably thinking to yourself come on Linus the reason we don't debate this is we already know The best way to remove thermal compound, but picture this okay? It's late at night. You got the big match tomorrow. You're building up your rig. You're ready to go except oh No There's no solvent. It turns out earlier in the day Little Johnny took all the rubbing alcohol poured it all over his skinned knee and now you've got nothing left So you're rummaging around in the kitchen the pantry of the bathroom and you come together with a list of stuff That looks a little something like this We've got 100% orange juice. We've got beer. We've got distilled water Gugon vinegar more beer Windex hydrogen peroxide Absolute vodka vodka vodka whatever you know what it is We've got nail polish remover alcohol based hand sanitizer coke isopropyl at 70 and 99% concentrations and finally Arctic silvers fancy expensive arctic clean surface preparation And we're gonna be testing each of them on the two major types of thermal compounds the more runny kind and the more kind of Particulate kind Okay, so we're gonna start with icy diamond and the methodology is pretty simple. We take the thermal compound we go And with a clean cpu and heat sink we apply the usual grain of rice size boop. There you go And slap our nhu 12s cooler on top of it Once it's screwed in all the way we give it the old wiggle to make sure it's uh fully spread out and leave it for a minute or two Then we take off the cooler. You can see how this is going to get pretty old pretty fast And there we have it a dirty cpu now the original plan was to take our solvents and kind of uh Dump them onto the cpu and then we realized oh, yeah That's uh, it's probably gonna make a bit of a mess. Hold on. So as a compromise We settled on using the heat sink as our test surface With the thermal compound smear covered we left each one for 60 to 120 seconds To allow the solvent to do its work After the waiting period we wiped each one five times without applying too much force We're evaluating how well the solvent works Not how hard we can press down on a heat sink Then to test we take something very clean and very fine. So a coffee filter in this case Wipe it off and boom That is how we collect our results for each solvent on each type of compound Okay We are done Screwdrivers down and we have the results. Okay, most of them are Are not very surprising but some of them are Basically, here's how the grading works if there's anything on the coffee filter. That's a fail So hydrogen peroxide I was expecting another topical sanitizer to do well. No, not so much beer Epic fail almost all of it stayed on the heat sink Windex This one performed Okay, it did leave a significant residue though. So we'll call that a c-minus Hand sanitizer so it is an alcohol based sanitizer and this actually performed really well So there's at least one household item that would work quite well Distilled water was actually the worst Not good for cleaning off your cpu Goo-gon though Excellent result here. We've got almost I would say nothing on our coffee filter Arctic clean. I mean this is a purpose designed Cleaner so this one performed perfectly as well and nail polish remover This one came in really well. Remember this is an acetone based one though. I wouldn't expect the same results from a regular one Vodka, okay guys. So if you gotta clean your cpu with alcohol Go with the vodka not with the beer Here's our isopropyl alcohol. I think we've put an end once and for all to the debate 70% versus 99% we're going with doesn't frickin matter Coke was basically tied with water and you get kind of a urine stain looking thing on your On your paper towel and the same goes with orange juice except even more urine Finally, we've got vinegar which worked actually much worse than I expected Barely removing any of it and finally the golden standard isopropyl 99% Well, that was fun now let's do it all over again with MX4. Here we go Wow, yep. Okay. The intent was to use a thermal compound. That's a lot thinner and mission frickin accomplished there. Here we go Okay, here we go last one whoa Three four five Wow the beer actually performed Shockingly well with an elementary water level Oh! Three, four, five. Wow! The beer actually performed shockingly well with MX4. Okay, let's get all the other results out here and do the whole roundup then. So for a thin compound like MX4, frickin' almost everything worked astonishingly. Okay, well that's isopropyl 99%. We expected that to work, but vodka, clean, vinegar. Okay, we got a couple little flecks there, but basically clean. Beer, beer worked. Hand sanitizer, Windex. Everything's got just like, you know, what we would consider a negligible, okay, Coke didn't work especially well, but Arctic Clean, absolutely flawless. That one looks great here. Nail polish remover, perfect. Distilled water, perfect. Sheesh. Hydrogen peroxide, perfect. That was an epic fail. First time around, 70% isopropyl, lookin' pretty good. Even orange juice worked. What? Leading us to Coke, which also worked. So the obvious question here then is, what could possibly go wrong while removing a thin compound like MX4? And let me show you. You can pull the CPU out of the socket when you go to lift the heat sink off. I had just done another mount so that I could, ugh. Oh. Oh. Oh, what is that? 1800X, oh, terrible, okay. Anyway, the point is, I had done a final one so I could do a live demo of how, while what we've discovered is that some household agents would work to remove thermal compound, another perfectly viable method in a pinch is straight up elbow grease. So here's one, two, three, four, five of those, and a coffee filter. And there's really not a whole lot left. So there you have it, guys. How to remove thermal compound, everything from super sensible ways all the way to stuff that makes no sense whatsoever, and how well they all worked. Thank you for watching. And please pray for our 1800X. It is always so confusing to me when I'm at the supermarket and I see people spending way too much on shaving cartridges. No, no, Dollar Shave Club is the way to go. 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As a summary, if you're going for thermal compound removal, we're thinking maybe the isopropyl alcohol or the Goo Gone or Arctic Clean, if you're just like a mad baller and you like to, you know, whatever, spend a lot of money on removing thermal compound. Also down there, you'll find a link to our t-shirt store as well as a link to our community forum, which you should totally join. You can go talk tech, including how stupid this test was right over there.