ElAssassin

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OK this may be funny but do you need to put thermal Past on the heat sink when installing your new chip? I got a Penium D 930 3.0 mhz and it did not come with any past or instructions telling you to put any on when installing it.
 

NMDante

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OK this may be funny but do you need to put thermal Past on the heat sink when installing your new chip? I got a Penium D 930 3.0 mhz and it did not come with any past or instructions telling you to put any on when installing it.

You don't need to, but the CPU won't last too long.

It's always a good idea to use thermal paste, since it can help with heat transfer, from CPU to HSF.
 

exit2dos

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If your CPU came with Intel's stock Heatsink and fan - there should be a pad on the bottom of the heatsink which acts as thermal paste.

If you're using another heatsink/fan then it should come with a mini tube of thermal paste.
 

ElAssassin

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God my spelling sucks. Paste I ment, but no there was no Pad and its the original fan and heat sink that came with the chip. I run games on my machine and with a X1600XTX the frame rates go right down to unplayable. Maybe the chip is overheating? Is this possible.

If your CPU came with Intel's stock Heatsink and fan - there should be a pad on the bottom of the heatsink which acts as thermal paste.

If you're using another heatsink/fan then it should come with a mini tube of thermal paste.
 

NMDante

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It might have had a little tube of white goopy stuff. That is the thermal paste, although it's not of the highest quality.

I wouldn't run the CPU too hard, until you get some thermal paste, even a $1 tube of white goop is better than metal to metal contact.
 

dojosmasher

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Yes, that's exactly what's happening. Pentium's including the P4 onwards will automatically throttle their speed down when they detect overheating. They've got a built in thermal sensor.

So you "could" run your cpu without any heatsink at all, though it would throttle itself down all the time and the heat itself would be damaging. The lack of thermal paste is no doubt doing the same thing, though not as much throttling is required.

If you search back in the archives of tomshardware you'll find a video of them removing the heatsink of a p4 will it's running, as you'll see the timedemo of quake3 or something drop in fps right away as it's auto throttled.

There's also one of the Athlon XP (or plain Athlon). At the time, AMD chips had no way to detect overheating so in the video you see the old Athlon freeze the system and start to give off smoke.

(edit) I just found this video, it's on the bottom of the page:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/09/17/hot_spot/page6.html

It was the Athlon (Thunderbird), I think it was just before the Athlon XP.