Help w/ Arctic Silver application

[Guest]

Just got my Northwood 2.0 and am getting ready to apply some Arctic Silver 3. Read some on-line instructions, but still had a few questions. First off I assume that I apply the silver to the entire metallic surface of the top of the chip, correct? But what about that pesky hole in the chip? Do I skip over it, fill it up? Any help would be appreciated. -- Heres a link to a page w/ a pic of the chip. http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020117/

 

[jihiggs]

i heard you werent supposed to use as on a p4? i thought you had to use a pad that comes with the hsf?

how do you shoot the devil in the back? what happens if you miss? -verbal

 

[Guest]

As far as I know it should be ok with P4. The instructions on the arctic silver website describe application to a p4, but the picture they show has considerably less surface area then my chip. There is some mention about not using it with older Xeon processors because of the large surface area... so dunno mabey its a bad thing.

I did however, find a review of AS 3 (link below) that shows pics of a dude slathering up a p4 that appears to have similiar surface area to mine. Anyone have any definitive answers either way?

http://209.120.143.253/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=8&page=2

 

[10GHZ]

from my personal experience, i found that AS3 dosn't work particularly well with larger surface areas, eg. a GPU core.
no matter how perfectly smooth i can get it, after i stick the hsf on , only very afew area of the core comes in contact with the hsf. normal ceremic grease tend to be sticky and more gel like, so they comes in to contact with the hsf quite well.
i would suggest you 2 run a test, apply AS3 on to the core as perfectly as u can and put the hsf on, then take it off and look at the bottom of the hsf, if u see a perfect square patch of grease, then you core is in good contact with the core.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info. Well I will take your advice and see what kind of contact I am getting between the cpu and HSF. Hopefully it will be good. I definatly want to get my system up and running over the comming long weekend and the only other thermal goop I have is some white stuff (ceramic?) that came w/ my Volcano 7+. If the AS3 fails I will probably just use that. Aside from AS3, what other thermal paste/pad do you recommend?

 

[10GHZ]

prove me wrong, but most of the thermal pads performs pretty much the same.