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Stabilant 22?

Korth
Level 14
Stabilant 22 is a proprietary conductive polymer used to clean, lubricate, and enhance electrical contacts/connectors. Supposedly better than similar products like DeoxIT, though both have their diehard adherents.

The S22 website is full of embarassingly pretentious and meaningless technobabble washed in a good dose of snake oil. But it's been around for decades and is used religiously by the aerospace and communications industries, military and defense organizations, engineers galore, and even NASA - so it's gotta have some useful merit.

It coats electrical contacts with a very thin, slightly transparent film, a little slippery to the touch, somewhat hard (yet not brittle), and nearly impossible to remove without a lot of abrasive/subtractive effort. I suspect the electrical enhancement comes from this stuff filling microscopic voids between electrical contacts, and that it's a much better conductor than air/vacuum - somewhat analogous to how a TIM fills the voids and enhances heat transfer on a thermal interface.

Anyhow, I've been using it for years on odds and ends. It doesn't do a lot for shiny new parts. But it can miraculously revive crusty old dead sticks of RAM, can restore dirty pins and points to perfect signal integrity, and can make a world of difference on crackly audio/radio/power connectors. I routinely paint it onto things like audio plugs and USB ports, it does no harm, and if nothing else it helps ensure the gold plating wears more gently over many years of plugging things in and out.

I'm considering application to my CPU, RAM, and PCIe connectors. Not expecting dramatic results, but maybe it might make the tiniest difference at OC thresholds? Eliminate variables caused by imperfect component mounting/seating/install? Allow me to gain a puny headroom advantage, 0.003V or +4MHz or whatever?

Has anyone already done this? And, if so, with what results? Is it entirely NOT recommended for any reason? Have any of you LN2 fanatics tried this? Maybe NASA likes this stuff because it hardens their systems against failure at extreme temperatures?

If there be no naysayers, then I'll guinea-pig it and post my before-and-after results/screenshots.
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." - Douglas Adams

[/Korth]
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Raja
Level 13
Try it. I'd imagine the only time you'll find additional stability with this type of contact treatment is if the pads were dirty or greasy first and this cleaned that off.

Raja@ASUS wrote:
Try it. I'd imagine the only time you'll find additional stability with this type of contact treatment is if the pads were dirty or greasy first and this cleaned that off.

I'm inclined to agree.

I don't think it will produce any measurable improvement on these electrical interfaces (which are, of course, always kept mechanically/chemically clean). I suppose it might help reduce EMI, if in fact there actually is any real EMI inside a CPU/DIMM/PCIe socket, lol. But The Man From Asus says I should try it, so I'll give it a try. 😉

Just curious - how thick are the gold platings on the Asus R5E? The only "standards" I could find are described here. And we all know that Gigabyte advertises "15um(3x)" or "30um(6x)" gold-plating on its UD products. I realize that Gigabyte exaggerates the electrical properties of this feature - it primarily only affects longevity (in terms of insertion/removal cycles) - and I doubt I need to worry about wearing off the gold after hundreds and hundreds of parts being inserted/removed from my mobo.
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." - Douglas Adams

[/Korth]

Korth wrote:
I doubt I need to worry about wearing off the gold after hundreds and hundreds of parts being inserted/removed from my mobo.


I seem to recall that back in Intel's slot 1 days the the cpu socket was only officially rated for half a dozen or so insertion/removal cycles... So it may help with those cpu's... 🙂