Cooling an RT-AC88U

[Denna]

thiggins,

When you wrote a review on the RT-AC88U, you opened up the case and removed the heat sinks.

Did Asus use thermal pads or paste/grease ?

If paste/grease, do you think using a better thermal grease would improve cooling ?​

 

[RMerlin]

Usually Asus only uses thermal tape or pads, not paste.

Using quality thermal paste might help lower the temperature, but I don't think it's worth killing your warranty for this. Under normal situations the temperature is well within tolerance margins.

 

[pete y testing]

Under normal situations the temperature is well within tolerance margins.

and thats the key , Op if your running the 88u at or near its max standard operating temps eg working temp ambient is between 0 and 40 deg c then you may need to set some form of active cooling like a usb powered fan etc to help remove hot air from the unit , a better option would be to move it somewhere cooler and with good ventilation , the only time my 88u starts to show stress here is when the temps push well past 30 deg c and closer to 40 deg c and to be honest im feeling pretty heat stressed myself under those conditions and usually turn on the AC

 

[sfx2000]

Asus only uses thermal tape or pads, not paste

And Asus knows a thing or two about thermal management.

(consider they're also a major player in the PC biz)

Paste is useful if/when the HS is removed - the OEM pad/tape solution from the factory is good enough for regular operations...

 

[Denna]

I was think about adding a laptop cooler or a custom fan setup.

 

[sfx2000]

I was think about adding a laptop cooler or a custom fan setup.

Wouldn't worry so much...

a) Broadcom isn't going to do a chip that will self-immolate...

b) Asus Engineering teams have validated the thermal solution across use cases that far exceed what people would do in the real world.

 

[Ironic77]

For anyone who discovers this thread:

I've had an RT-AC88U for nearly 2.5 years - almost since they came out. Worked like a champ for years. Well, this year (almost summer time), house temps getting to 25C and more streaming than ever going on, stability issues have crept in, especially when activity logging is enabled (or perhaps the NVRAM is going bad... if that's even where these logs are stored?). I'm not clear for sure what is going on, but seeing >86C on the CPU around the time of major instability was scaring me. Maybe for no good reason. I pulled the unit apart (because I'm 95% sure it isn't under warranty anymore anyway after spending hours trying to even track down warranty information, and even if it is, I can't part with the unit while they decide that the problem won't reproduce because it isn't hot and isn't under load). So far, I replaced the pads with grease. But the issue is that with grease, I'm still not getting good contact because there's about 1mm between the sink and chip cover. The CPU temps are a little lower now (75C, though I can't be sure the conditions are identical) and took all day to climb up. But, that said, the sinks are still not even close to as hot as the CPU. So I'm thinking of trying new 1mm pads next. The provided pads were in ok shape, though clearly not new. The contact also was ok but not great. Not sure why they did it with such small pads, as pads can't cost that much?

If you're curious what the instabilities are - primarily the throughput gets spotty, and the web interface completely stops responding. I've reproduced this on every major build in the past 3 months, even Merlin builds, and even after full reset, so I feel like this is probably the right course of action until I see similar widespread reports. Generally it takes a week or so for the problems to creep in with activity disabled, but with it enabled, usually within a single day.

 

[venture996]

How do you view your CPU temp?