Cleaning the heatsink

[shoebox]

i lick the TIM myself, it doesn't taste to bad, All joke's aside when i ran out of Isopropyl, i substituted Dettol Antiseptic Liquid, no problems with it, i know its not the "Norm" to use it, but i worked with what i had on hand.

[Walthor]

Alright, I couldnt get ahold of any isopropanol so I just used a lint free cloth dabbed in terpentine to get it off, worked fine. My new nh-d14 is sitting happily atop an i7 950 cooling away, that stock intel one was horrible.
Its so much better

[Wries]

>> acid is not a solvent, so doesn't tend to be used for this type of purpose... and even if you WERE going to use acid to remove something, lemon juice has sugar in it which will most certainly make a mess of the contact. I'd NOT recommend it :P

Simple rubbing alcohol from the drug store is less than a dollar and works just fine.

I'm not sure you can generalize acid and say it's not a solvent. But hey not my area and chemistry classes were a while ago.

I was smelling the arcticlean bottle no 1 and went, hey, smells like lemon! Turns out as I understand it it does contain citric acid and I can't complain on how easy it was removing the TIM with a squeeze of lemon.

Though I'll admit I cheated and used bottle no 2 of ArctiClean afterwards :P

[Latitude]

I've used Carburetor Cleaner, Acetone, Xylene, Alcohol and several other things to clean heatsinks in the past.

Now though, I use Denture Cleaning tabs. They work great.
I look for anything labeled as being for smokers that isn't flavored as they tend to work the best. They work really well on heatsinks without having to deal with any kind of nasty smelling chemicals. Just fill a bowl with hot water, drop in a tab, soak for 30 minutes then rinse, dry and reinstall. They're very gentle and have never caused any kind of corrosion or tarnishing on aluminum, copper or silver heatsinks.
They're also really good for cleaning all kinds of other things made of metal, plastic, porcelain or glass like coffee pots and mugs, vases, pipes, eyeglasses, etc...

I would advise AGAINST anyone using acetone or xylene to clean your heatsink unless you can remove it from any resembling plastic.