Laptop CPU with no Thermal Paste?!

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Racinglife12

Racinglife12

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Apr 10, 2014
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I've got an Acer Aspire 3005WLMi with an AMD Sepron 3300+ CPU in it.
I recently cleaned it out for the 1st time in 8years :O and suprisingly it wasn't that dusty.
I took the CPU out and saw that there was no Thermal Compund on it. Can that CPU even handle thermal compound because it didn't look like it...
I want to add it with Artic SIlver 5 but I'm not sure if it will be safe
 
Solution
Solandri
Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of thermal compound is not to sit between the CPU and heatsink. Its purpose is to fill in microscopic pits and gaps when you mate those two surfaces together. Without thermal paste, those gaps become air gaps. And air is a great insulator - practically anything conducts heat better.

So the ideal case is to polish the CPU's heat spreader and heat sink so they're perfectly smooth and flat, and mate them together without any paste. Pure metal-on-metal contact. If the thermal paste sits between the two and reduces the metal-on-metal contact area more than it reduces the air gaps, then it will actually make the CPU run hotter.

So try it both with and without paste, and see which works best. If...
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of thermal compound is not to sit between the CPU and heatsink. Its purpose is to fill in microscopic pits and gaps when you mate those two surfaces together. Without thermal paste, those gaps become air gaps. And air is a great insulator - practically anything conducts heat better.

So the ideal case is to polish the CPU's heat spreader and heat sink so they're perfectly smooth and flat, and mate them together without any paste. Pure metal-on-metal contact. If the thermal paste sits between the two and reduces the metal-on-metal contact area more than it reduces the air gaps, then it will actually make the CPU run hotter.

So try it both with and without paste, and see which works best. If it was originally designed to mate without paste, chances are they machined it well enough that you don't really need paste.
 
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