So, after watching enough LinusTechTips I have the term isopropyl alcohol ingrained in my head. I just realized I've been using generic rubbing alcohol to clean my CPUs, and noticed that mine is actually 70% ethyl alcohol. I was wondering: is there is a difference for the purpose of CPU cleaning?
There actually is, but Rubbing alcohol will do just fine in most cases. I've used it before occasionally, nothing bad happened.
What I think works really well are these little individually packaged pads for cleaning the skin before applying sports tape. They are lint-free, disposable, textured but still soft, and there's quite a bit of isopropyl alcohol on them, enough to clean a CPU and a heatsink baseplate with one pad, and they're really cheap.
Do you know the specific difference? I've just been using the Ethyl alcohol with coffee filters. I haven't noticed anything bad myself, but Linus seems to always put emphasis on [b][i][u]isopropyl[/b][/i][/u] whenever he brings up alcohol for CPU cleaning. From what I gather, rubbing alcohol is a generic term for a solution (forgive the improper chemistry terminology if I misused "solution") that can be either isopropyl or ethyl.
isopropyl is a 99% alcahol sollution, the stronger or strongest stuff like this just makes the job easier... that's all really
For your use generic rubbing alcohol is fine. Isopropyl is just a bigger molecule and more useful as a solvent. What a solvent does is it is better at dissolving a solute. So maybe Linus thinks that the alcohol is a solvent and the TIM is a solute and that isopropyl is better than ethyl at dissolution.(Not to put words in his mouth, but that is my guess at why he emphasizes isopropyl.)
Isopropyl can be found at various dilutions with distilled water making it less concentrated, but none the less is still isopropyl. Concentrations have very little to do with the type of alcohol.
well of couse you can dilute it but iv only ever seen the 99% stuff going around, meaning from what iv seen that's the most commonly distributed concentration of it.
As to the effect on TIM, as a solvent for parafine that is, I'm quite sure both are equally effective, both form an azeotropic solution with water that makes sure there is no residue with the right concentration (around 70%), the aromatic terpenoids (organic lipids that dissolve in alcohol very well) in rubbing alcohol don't leave a residue either, but stink. So yes isopropanol is more userfriendly because it stinks less.
+1 to you. That was some interesting information.
Just curious, would it be effective to use, say Acetone, or would that harm the chip in some way? It's just easier to get my hands on that since we have drums of the stuff at work. I'm pretty sure carb-cleaner and brake cleaner is safe since my old CPU didn't die from me using that on it.
Acetone is not a good idea, because it will not dissolve parafine. I don't want to expand on this, but you can actually use a mixture of acetone with hexanes to solve it but that's a mixture you don't want to make at home, let me keep it at that.
Basically, pure alcohol (whether ethanol or propanol or methanol) will affect the metal, so it can't be used, plus it's very hard to work with, because by the time it will have dissolved all the gunk you want off of the metal surface, it will have evaporated. The cool thing is, that when you mix alcohol with distilled water, it forms an azeotropic sollution, basically lowering the boiling point of water and slowing down the evaporation of the alcohol, which is what you really want, because the water will evaporate quickly together with the alcohol, after the solution has dissolved the parafine and the lipids that are on there, so everything evaporates and there is no residue. If you want to learn more about this, take a look at the natural molecular state of distilled water, how it's not really H2O but rather H30+ and OH- combined, and how that interacts with alcohol molecules and with fats and lipids, more specifically what the tails of fats and lipids have in common with the alcohol and the water. If you search for a graphical representation of the molecules, you'll see it happen graphically, it just makes sense.
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