Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Douglas
someone said to get new paste to put between the heatsink and cpu.
Any recommendations as to which one to buy?
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LOL - this could be a question like "are Monster speaker cables worth $50 a foot" or the great oil debates....
I like Arctic Silver, personally. I've usd multiple products of theirs, their current offering is Arctic Silver 5. Works fine - I even used it on the CHT plate I put between the fins on my 930, as it was to hand...
I'd avoid really cheap "no-name" stuff - I wouldn't trust it to not go solid - but almost any "name brand" thermal grease designed for the purpose should be perfectly fine. In much the same way as any decent motor oil would be fine in a modern car without special requirements. Certainly not worth paying a fortune for some whizz-bang supposed magic ingredient...
$10-15 or so buys you a 3.5 or 5g syringe, that'll treat plenty of chips/CPUs. Don't ignore any other chips that may also have heat sinks, like the North/South bridge or an integrated GPU.
Most manufacturers, for years, have just used a sticky thermal pad between the chip and the heatsink, even on very high end equipment (including rack-mount E-class servers). Saves them a few pennies and some assembly time. It's borderline criminal IMO...
I use thermal compound on any computer or laptop I own or touch. Xeon cores in my desktop ran 10C cooler after - that with the factory heatsink being almost 10" high, with 4 copper tubes filled with Freon, with a high CFM fan pointed right at it...
The sticky pads are simply not a great thermal conductor; and air is an insulator. Instead, a thin even layer of the paste fills the air gaps and provides a better pathway for the heat.
Also clean any dust bunnies out of any cooling fins etc.