WGU: One Semester In

The beginning of March marks the end of my first semester and beginning of my second. It was a lot of learning to self lead and take charge of my schedule for learning. I managed to finish 7 classes which finished with Calculus 1.

  • Introduction to IT
  • Applied Probability and Statistics
  • Web Development Foundations
  • Network and Security – Foundations
  • Scripting and Programming – Foundations
  • Integrated Physical Sciences
  • Calculus 1

Finishing those brought me to 24% completion of the 122 credit hours required for the Bachelors of Computer Science. My starting second semester work load looks like it should go relatively quickly. I’m hopeful that Discrete Mathematics I & II are either interesting or simple (I have experience in the application of sets and graphs but what proofs can I come away with that would be helpful for thinking in the future?).

  • Natural Science Lab
  • Introduction to Communication
  • Discrete Mathematics I
  • Discrete Mathematics II

WGU: One Month In

This last weekend marked one month into my back to school adventures! It has been a whirlwind of a month. I have managed to complete 4(!) of my classes for the semester. That means that I am technically finished with the originally scheduled classes for the whole 6 months. To be fair, these were all very tame introductory courses:

  • Introduction to IT
  • Applied Probabilities and Statistics
  • Web Development Foundations
  • Network and Security Foundations

My current mindset for each class is to go through the curriculum 100% prior to going through the pre-assessment. This allows me to fill in any of the gaps that I may have compared to the class. It also allows me to speed read through a LOT of subject matter, as it is nearly all review. After the pre-assessment i know if I need to study any particular points more and can quickly schedule the actual objective assessment. Hopefully this will give me plenty of time for the future new or difficult subjects and maintain a pace that will produce a Bachelors of Computer Science in only a year!

Intel NUC Thermal Paste: Follow Up

tl;dr

You can get a decent reduction in thermals by using quality thermal paste and quality silicone thermal pads. Replacement fans can be had for a very reasonable rate as well. You don’t want to go for the lowest price but you don’t have to pay the straight Intel SKU prices either. Check the links at the end for quality products at a moderate price.


While this dates back to October of 2020 for the time frame of when I did the replacements, I figure it couldn’t hurt to give some information to the community. A few months after my last post our little computer ended up having thermal throttling issues again. Not quite to the point of thermal shutdown, but enough that the fan would randomly peak with no load. This came down to two issues: 5 year old thermal paste and previously compressed silicone thermal pads.

After a few more weeks of this random fan peaking, we began hearing a terrible noise coming from the unit. The bearings had ended up going bad in the stock cooler! At this point, I decided to sink the cost and replace everything involved in cooling the CPU. Replacement fan, fresh high efficiency thermal paste, and a mixed pack of silicone thermal pads.

After searching around Amazon for various replacements, I ended up choosing products in the moderate expense category. The fan shown here was the middle ground for the price while maintaining good reviews. It looked identical to the installed unit, unlike the cheapest. The most expensive was ~$50 and had the specific SKU offered, looking like a direct replacement part straight from Intel. After more than 6 months I can say it was worth all of $13.

On the thermal paste side, I was seeing roughly three tiers in terms of heat transferability. Corsair TM30 at 3.5W/mk, Arctic MX-4 at 8.5W/mk, and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut (the best) at 12.5W/mk. This isn’t including liquid metal thermal paste, which I wouldn’t recommend for anyone unless you have a highly specific use case. Now I admit I’m not an expert, but I do understand that these numbers relate to the ability of the thermal paste to transfer heat. Larger is better. At the time the price range was something like $7 for the low end, $10 for the middle ground, and $30 for the high end. This has since changed. Now that I see Kryonaut in a smaller package for only $10, just by raw numbers I would easily recommend it instead.

Thermal pads were new to me. I’ve never actually seen a product use them before and after taking the NUC apart I realized there was no way to truly know the original thickness of them. To resolve this I found some higher quality but inexpensive silicone thermal pads. These were rated at 6W/mk, this was better than the thermal paste I had originally used to replace the stock stuff! For only $5 I was able to get three sizes to try out: 0.5mm, 1.0mm, and 1.5mm. The 0.5mm turned out to be usable, although you could have compressed the 1mm down enough easily to use it instead. Because I don’t know what the tolerance differences are between different models, I would still recommend this style of package. In the end you are left with ~5 sheets of highly performant thermal pads that can be used for various projects.

So far so good, I haven’t had any issues with these products in the past 6+ months they have been installed. Honestly, I don’t have any specifications for what Intel uses, but I wouldn’t doubt it if you could get better thermals than stock by replacing the paste and pads from the get-go. We now have a NUC that only spins up its fans when being used in heavy computation or graphical environments. As it should be.

Products used:

A small laptop cpu cooler fan. Black with four braided cables coming off the side. A blue tube of thermal compound with 'MX-4 Thermal Compound' on the side. A stack of six gum stick shaped pieces of silicone thermal pads.

Images sourced from amazon links*

Intel NUC Thermal Paste

Today I was fed up with our NUC acting super janky. A game we have played often on this same platform had been stuttering heavily at random times after a RAM stick had failed. This brought us from 8Gb total down to 4Gb. That kind of failure was a first for me. We received a replacement 8Gb stick to get the old ram pair entirely out of the device and went forward with playing. The stutters we’re definitely lessened but I wasn’t convinced it was just a RAM issue.

So I decided to break down our NUC. There was plenty of dust in the fan and cooler fins, but I found that the factory installed paste looked pretty crusty. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t doing its job, however I figured if I was already this deep I should just replace the paste anyway. It definitely helped that I had some laying around. So far after cleaning everything up, reapplying, and booting up we haven’t had any stutters since. It doesn’t hurt to try some DIY to fix your own issues.

Saturday Stroll On The Waterfront

Christina and I decided to go for a walk on the waterfront as a way to get out of the house for a bit yesterday. I’m really glad we did as we came across this little guy! It’s a California Ground Squirrel, something I’d never seen, especially here in Washington. Apparently they are relatively common in Oregon and come from California. It was munching on some nice clover-like creeping ground cover. We probably spent 15-20 minutes just watching it munch away and scurry around; it was incredibly docile. Can’t wait to get out some more in the near future and enjoy nature!