maybe this will help you https://www.snbforums.com/threads/ac86u-heatsink-mod.71922/
that you have tracked both ambient and CPU temps and have observed a (rather reasonable) stable delta is commendable.Here's my personal contribution, just as additional reference:
Thank you all.
- RT-AC86U manufactured in 2019, running in Router mode
- No add-ons, no VPN, no ethernet connections, 2.4GHz radio at 20MHz, 5GHz at 40MHz (80MHz is not currently needed, resulting in 4-5C lower 5GHz temperature)
- After upgrading from 384.19 to 386.3_0 (with several NVRAM/Factory resets, etc.), I observed a consistent CPU temperature increase of 6C
- The router now idles at 48C above room temperature - that delta is very regular within an ambient temperature range of 17C to 24C
- No change detected after the upgrade to 386.3_2 (also a "clean" install)
I don't think so. If you look at photo 10 of the FCC filing it clearly shows that there are meant to be thermal pads for those three chips. Looks like they were accidentally left out at the factory which would explain your initial temperature problem.I opened my unit and after i removed the "heatsink" there were no thermal pads none on the WIFI chips and CPU. Don't know if that how it supposed to be or not by anyway...
Yup that's what i though...I don't think so. If you look at photo 10 of the FCC filing it clearly shows that there are meant to be thermal pads for those three chips. Looks like they were accidentally left out at the factory which would explain your initial temperature problem.
No idea. The FCC documents don't go down to that level and it's something that could change with each hardware revision. Better that you measure the gap for your particular router anyway.Any clue what thickness the pads on the wifi chips?
Any clue what thickness the pads on the wifi chips? @Tech9
I used Thermalright Odyssey pads on the cpu mod i did, they are pretty soft from what i can tell.. softer than the Arctic Cooling pads.The RF chips gap is about 1.5mm. You can use 2mm pads, but it depends on the material. The original pink ones are very soft and squishy. If yours are similar, cut the pads smaller than the cutout in RF shield to allow expansion. The CPU gap is about 2.4mm.
The ones i used on the CPU pretty soft, I've got an Arctic Cooling Pads and they are harder.Thermal transfer pads are different for different applications. The ones Arcadyan used (the manufacturer of most Asus routers) are perhaps uretane sponge with silicone grease. Those are the soft gap filler ones. Some thermal pads are aluminum/zinc oxides and support mesh sandwich type, used for fine imperfections. Those are the hard ones, used between IC/transistors and direct contact heatsinks. You can easily tell what type yours are. The spongy ones are thicker and feel like oily rubber, the hard ones are thin and brittle.
Just for the record, again with my RT-AC68... did the upgrade to 386.3_2 this weekend. Had to do a hard reset, as the GUI never came back (waited 24 hours with no luck, but routing worked the entire time). During the entire time, temperatures stayed low.FWIW, RT-AC68 user... had this router for many years now, and it felt like it was getting warm, so I bought the dual-fan kit sold by AliExpress (mentioned earlier on this thread - thank you!). Got it today, put it on.
Room temp = 72F (22C)
Original temps = 53, 57, 84C
With dual fan, it dropped to these values in about 30 minutes = 42, 46, 61C
All are on 384.19 FW... I resisted updating because there were mixed reports of increasing temps, so I figured I should do this before updating. Next step will be to update the FW to the current version... but probably not until the weekend.
pwr config -eee on
pwr show
Sorry to hear about your experience, seems some aren't affected and some are. I just left 384 myself but my AC86U is on AP duty only. I was on 384.18, that seemed to me to be peak firmware for the model. I haven't noticed the temp issue post "upgrade", but in addition to going minimal duty, removing all scripts and USB drive reformatting to factory etc., the 2.4ghz radio went way unreliable, so I've retired that radio and farmed out 2.4ghz to an Airport Extreme that was gathering dust.upgrade from the 384 firmware
Disabling 5GHz finally lowered the temperatures from 94 Celsius to 84 in average. Still not ideal, just ordered a new dedicated firewall hardware as I am fed up with tweaking things constantly.Sorry to hear about your experience, seems some aren't affected and some are. I just left 384 myself but my AC86U is on AP duty only. I was on 384.18, that seemed to me to be peak firmware for the model. I haven't noticed the temp issue post "upgrade", but in addition to going minimal duty, removing all scripts and USB drive reformatting to factory etc., the 2.4ghz radio went way unreliable, so I've retired that radio and farmed out 2.4ghz to an Airport Extreme that was gathering dust.
Back in its heyday, the AC86U was highly performant, now I'm only enjoying its excellent 5ghz coverage hoping that doesn't get messed by some latent feature creep which I'll try to avoid, we had a good run. I've graduated to an open source DIY firewall appliance with AP's model, and feel like I have my network under more secure control.
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