Can someone explain all this talk on thermal grease? I've read a lot of this thread, but it isn't entirely clear to me.
From what I understand, you are taking off the heat sinks, adding thermal grease, and then putting them back. Why do you have to do this? It seems it makes it cooler - does that make them hash faster? Which heat sinks do you replace? Is this a problem only with Batch 1-3 or something, or would you recommend this for all of them?
A lot of questions, I will try to answer them all with in my capacity.
If you have watch this thread you may already know why all are doing the heat sink hack.
In most of the miners various users found that the thermal paste is not applied correctly.
Some miners don't have enough thermal paste, others have a lot of them leaking to the pins of the chips.
That's why a lot of hash rate issues in S3, bitmaintech even advised to do it.
Chip throttled to lower clock frequency when they are overheated. When the thermal paste is not properly applied
this will lead to overheating due to lower heat conductance and the result is lower hash rate.
So removing the old thermal paste and applying a thermal grease of minimum conductivity of 3 will help the heat
to dissipate properly which will further lead to higher/rated hashrate.
The smaller heatsink attached to the outer side or front side or the chip side is what we are discussing here.
Since the opposite side is a flat surface chances of wrong application on that side is comparatively low.
We are not replacing heatsink but the thermal paste.
If you can apply to all miners its good. But generally fix those who are not working properly.
Keep an eye on temperatures, fans speed, hashrate.
