NUC6i7KYK - How to replace thermal paste? Walk through?

[BRide1]

Hi folks. I just bought a NUC6i7KYK and I love it other than the fan consonantly running even when idle doing nothing. Driving me nuts. I was wondering if anyone had created or can point me in the direction of replacing the thermal paste on the CPU. There is no reason the fan should be cruising 100% of the time the way it is other than bad paste application. Help appreciated. Thanks.

[AlHill]

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005576/processors.html

Doc

[LeonWaksman]

Do not hurry to the conclusion that there is bad thermal paste applied. I suggest that first try to change the bios settings:

In Advanced > Cooling apply the following:

Minimum Duty Cycle: 25%

Minimum Temperature: 80 C

Duty Cycle Increment: 4 %

In Advanced > Primary Power Settings:

Processor Power Efficiency Policy:  check Balanced Enabled

If still the blower is noisy

In Advanced > Performance >Processor: uncheck Intel Turbo Boost Technology.

Leon

[BRide1]

Hi Leon,

I had a question about your response. Won't those changes make the machine throttle the processor in some way or slow it down?

[LeonWaksman]

Intel Turbo Boost Technology is a way to automatically run the processor core faster than the marked frequency. The processor must be working in the power, temperature, and specification limits of the thermal design power (TDP). This results in increased performance of both single and multithreaded applications. So, when this future is enabled in BIOS, the processor frequency is rising in order to increase performance when needed. However in order to keep the system in the designed thermal limits, also the RPM of the Cooling Fan is throttling. In my opinion, in some of NUC models proper software filter is not used and as result the Cooling Fan makes lot of noise during CPU frequency rise.

If the fan noise is disturbing, you may disable Turbo Boost Technology and the processor's will be constant and so, the FAN's RPM. You will not fill slow down in normal computer use and only small effect in gaming.

Please adjust the cooling as I've advised in my post above, disable the Turbo Boost Technology in Bios (press F10 followed by "Y" to save settings) and check how it's works. Always you may re enable this future.

Leon

[BRide1]

Got it. I won't be doing any gaming really. More so used for running VMs so maybe this will be okay. I will try this out this weekend and post back. Thanks again for the detailed responses. Really appreciate that.

[BRide1]

Got it. thank you for your replies.

[n_scott_pearson]

I would also add that there is no such thing as idle in Windows 10. There are a whole raft of maintenance tasks running all the time and they most-definitely can drive​ the processor temperature close to limits.

...S