How often should one give a Mac Pro a "lube job" by replacing the thermal paste at the heat sinks? I recently tore down an old Mac Pro that had died (bought it for parts) and found that the paste was dried up and had a burnt appearance. It seems simple enough to replace the paste, but is there any risk of damage in handling the processors while doing this kind of maintenance? I have several machines that are over 10 years old that have probably never had this done. I found a post about a problem that came up after doing it. It does not appear that the problem has been resolved. So perhaps it is best to leave well enough alone.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 1,1-5,1 Is thermal paste servicing recommended?
- Thread starter cinclodes
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
As your post points out, you can introduce problems by performing "unnecessary maintenance", so I'd limit it to actually if you're seeing a problem (temps are higher than normal on the CPU.) Given that the cheese grater Mac Pros are all 10+ years and coming up on 20, replacing the paste at least once doesn't seem crazy, you just need to be sure you're competent enough to not make it worse. Badly-applied thermal paste can be worse than old paste.
Thermal paste has improved a great deal since the Mac pro 4.1 and 5.1 were released. a high quality thermal paste, ie thermal grizzly will improve temps on Old dried out applications from 10+ years ago. if you have never performed a thermal paste update before there are plenty of U tube vid's on how to go about it.
The same goes for the north bridge heat sink held in with plastic sprung clips. the clips can break leaving the heatsink sitting off the north bridge which will make it over heat and possibly fail.
I would never call up grading thermal paste as a waste of time, same goes for north bridge clip replacement with new thermal paste on that heatsink. For instance if the north bridge heaksink has one clip broken it will lift one side offering very little cooling. If said north bridge over heats it can fail and that is the end of your CPU board.
The same goes for the north bridge heat sink held in with plastic sprung clips. the clips can break leaving the heatsink sitting off the north bridge which will make it over heat and possibly fail.
I would never call up grading thermal paste as a waste of time, same goes for north bridge clip replacement with new thermal paste on that heatsink. For instance if the north bridge heaksink has one clip broken it will lift one side offering very little cooling. If said north bridge over heats it can fail and that is the end of your CPU board.
I had over heating issues with my 5.1 ( specifically Northbridge temps) that i had purchased from OWC a few years ago. I read that after 10 years it would be a good time to redo thermal paste. I did cpu and northbridge and that took care of my mac pro sounding like a jet engine taking off. I was lucky with the clips. I didnt have issues. I used arctic thermal paste. No complaints.
It’s time for me to change the thermal paste on my dual XEON Mac Pro 5.1 2010. I use TG fan Pro, works fine but without it, the idle temp are around 70 degrees celsius.
I will replace both XEON aswell to X5650 to get a little better performance and my RAM hopefully can run at 1333Mhz.
I know this job is risky but i have worked with repairing electronics, mostly soldering components, fault seeking, testing, in ESD-safe environments, but that were 15 years ago. But i think i can do it. My question is about the Thermal paste, i was thinking of Arctic Silver 5 first, but there are others that seems to be better and does not lead electricity (sorry my bad english) so i am looking now at Arctic MX4, Noctua and so on. What is recommended to use, i see there are big differences according cooling and lasting. Right now i think Noctua will be a good choice, but if anyone have any better choice i would be grateful.
I will replace both XEON aswell to X5650 to get a little better performance and my RAM hopefully can run at 1333Mhz.
I know this job is risky but i have worked with repairing electronics, mostly soldering components, fault seeking, testing, in ESD-safe environments, but that were 15 years ago. But i think i can do it. My question is about the Thermal paste, i was thinking of Arctic Silver 5 first, but there are others that seems to be better and does not lead electricity (sorry my bad english) so i am looking now at Arctic MX4, Noctua and so on. What is recommended to use, i see there are big differences according cooling and lasting. Right now i think Noctua will be a good choice, but if anyone have any better choice i would be grateful.
Artic silver 5 is fine for thermal paste, as for CPU upgrade i would recommend the X5680 3.33ghz and about as fast as you can get. cheap also on ebay. when releasing the CPU coolers do it evenly from corner to corner in an X pattern. same for when replacing, tighten evenly again in an X pattern. I am sure you will be fine.👍
I have now changed both XEON to X5650, I used a thermal paste named Plexgear MX-990 Carbon Freeze. The computer overall is cooler now too. it took me almost 3 hours to do this, I cleaned the board carefully with ISP, the thermal stripe I did not change, looked fine but I had a little of the cooling paste on it. the previous owner seem to have fixed the issue with the vinyl washers, everything looked fine. Now I can't get the RAM to run in 1333, did a NVRAM reset, also a SMC reset. I guess I have to check all modules, but if I remember correct I bought only the Hynix 10600E. Will check those tomorrow.
In the past I have exchanged the thermal paste of the CPU of for example an iMac 2009 or MacBook Pro 2012, when this hardware was (at the time) 5-10 years old - closer to 10. In these cases the paste had dried up and the temps looked a bit too high to me. The temps improved a bit, but more noticable was that especially the MBP fans would come down quicker after a utilization spike ended.
Seems for me that Arctic Silver or similar had been used and had dried a little, i need a lint free cloth with ISP to get it off, I cleaned the old E5620, for spare parts in case if something got wrong. The thermal paste i used now seems to be good, i had my Mac running over night, and i can see today also that the average temperature is about 7 degrees Celsius lower. Today i will inspect the RAM modules, maybe the problem with speed are because all of them ar Udimm, if that is the problem I believe i will buy a OWC-kit 64 or 128GB, cheap here in Sweden.
I was looking for 95W since i was concerned about the heat. Not sure now if X5680 is 95 or 133W.
Anyway my way to do this was from the technical manual, but also marked the holes with paper-tape, i marked the T-Hexwrench too. Then i start loose carefully each one of them (hole 1 at bottom left then 2 top right and so on, just a quarter at a time while i held the sink with my left hand. Halfways i turned a each one 360 degrees, and still holding the sink with left hand. Nr 1 and 4 loosed first, and then 2 and 3. Now i felt the sink was loose and only the connector was holding it. So with both hands i lifted the sink carefully straight up.
Reassembling was harder, i needed much light, and sitting on my knee i aligned the sink with the holes, and the connector. Then carefully i just let the sink go in place.
When tightening i hold the sink with my left hand again, and this time i put a tiny pressure upwards, needed to be extremely careful, then each one max a quarter, i noticed the sink was start move up and down, and there i realized the extreme importance to a exact a quarter in correct order, sometimes i tight one of them little more, so i needed to loosen little. Then i checked with bubble level the sink position. In my case when the first one came to stop, hole number 4, number 1 did afterwards too, and the rest aswell due to correct order when tightening. The technical manual from Apple said “when comes to fingertight, continue 1/4 more. In my case that was impossible, the bolts wont move more. Dunno if I done something wrong, but it was impossible to tighten more.
The Mac has run fine several hours now and i hope it will continue do so. Will check the RAM later today.
Sounds like you made a good job and every thing is working and stable, with a good temp reduction. Once you have looked at your ram speed, you should be good to go and upgrade to the 1333. Ram is cheap enough off ebay, not a great lover of the OWC ram option as have seen some failure's.
Thank you.
I checked my RAM, and the two Hynix 4GB that were non ECC i removed and replaced with two 2GB Hynix with ECC, that resolved the problem and now i have 1333. My Mac is extremely much faster now, it’s like a new computer 😁. So in RAM i have total 28GB. I wonder if it’s necessary to upgrade more RAM? I can buy a OWC kit 64GB for about 90€ here in Sweden. I would like to start converting high res video, and i work a lot in Photoshop. I have the GTX 680 2GB card, i think i’m done with upgrades, maybe more RAM. I will boot into High Sierra today and do a benchmark, main OS i use is Monterey maybe the Mac runs faster in HS
Glad to read you have your ram sorted and now have 1333 very good indeed, you can gain another 5% performance by only using D ram slots 1-2-3 and nothing in dim slot 4 as you will then gain 3 channel performance. glad all went well though through out your upgrade.