Heat Sink Thermal Grease...to add or not?

The AS5 will work better than the stock stuff. Scrape off the old stuff and apply the AS5 in a smooth, thin layer.

Clean the old stuff off first with alcohol and a rag. It comes off pretty easy.

The thermal adhesive provided by AMD is crap. Get some arctic silver 5/ceramique and apply that after killing the adhesive.

Great! Thanks for the info! That's exactly what I needed to know.

It actually works just FINE, provided you aren't an idiot: The heatsink needs to be applied on one, smooth continuous movement to prevent damaging the surface of the pad. The CPU must not be moved or twisted afterwards, and once the machine has been running for a while, the heatsink absolutely must NOT be moved at all. If you follow those rules, then the stock pad is more than adequate.

I agree that Arctic Silver is preferable, but only of you are super picky, want to overclock and have the time required to strip the pad, and do it manually. It's not an option in a commercial operation; every minute spent building = less profit...

He is overclocking.

yeah its way better to scrape it off. All the stock compound are crap.

i have a 3700 sandiego that is oced to 2607 and it runs at 80 to 84f
and about 98 t0 102 under load with radio shack thermal paste
so the stock paste should work fine

i was using the radio shack paste before. There was a big diffrence going from radio shack to artic 5.

really i have never seen any diff in my experience
but i overclock and also dont see any diff in that either
oh by the you dont need any paste period my brother ran a barton 2800 on a k7n2 for almost 2 years with stock hsf and no paste
and it still works although i dont recomend it

i forgot to add that the barton is now using paste

The stock stuff is pretty good.

If you want to OC significantly get a Zalman copper cooler + AS5

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?DEPA=0&ty...

Good Luck  

meh, that's really overkill for an AMD processor. I found that out the hard way, buying a vantec tornado for a 3200...
stock fan/aluminum block of crap should be fine, although something else is flashier/better performing.

i have a arctic freezer for my 3700 it didnt change temps at all
but my brother has a 3500 clawhammer and he put the same cooler on his and the temps went from 115f to 89 or 92 at idle
so thats seems pretty good

san diego's and clawhammers are very different chips. sand diego's run cool, clawhammers run hot.

Just in case I thought I'd send you the link from Arctic Silver on how to apply it properly.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions....

yes his clawhammer is a 130nm and the sandy is 90nm
the volts are lower on the newer proceesors to
but most of you in here already know this stuff