Did I mess up with thermal paste?

MaxRabbit

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On my new system, I bought the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, and I applied Arctic Silver thermal paste. However, I just read that at least the Arctic Cooling heatsink for AMD motherboards has pre-applied thermal paste-so I assume the Freezer 7 does, too. Do I now have two thermal pastes on my CPU?!
 

rgeist554

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Just pop your HS off and check the bottom. If you've got a light grey square on the bottom, then it came pre-applied. If that's the case, just scrape it off and reapply.

I'm guessing that if you put on too much, it will just elevate your temps a bit, but not necessarily make it unsafe.
 
35-186-134-03.jpg

That grey patch on the heat sink is the AC Freezer 7 Pro's pre-applied thermal compound.
And the pre-applied MX-1 or MX-2 paste is actually very good.
mx2Chart_480.png

(comparison chart from Artic Cooling MX-2 website and a seperate review @ Tweaktown)

You'll want to clean the heat sink and CPU heat spreader and use a single application of thermal compound.
 

rgeist554

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Hah! There is Rosewill, always a mark of quality. >.>

Arctic Silver is pretty good, but not the best... it is just very well known, so it gets the reputation for being awesome. Try some Shin Etsu. :)

But even so, won't it greatly reduce the effectiveness of the Arctic Silver?
Well, like I said in my earlier post, it will likely elevate your temps as it begins to act as an insulator once you apply too much.
 

MaxRabbit

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Okay-thanks for that info; can you please tell me how I can get the CPU fan/heatsink off of the CPU with the motherboard in the case?

Or do I have to remove the entire motherboard? It just seems like it would be hard to remove the CPU fan/heatsink with the motherboard in the case (or even if I got it off, it seems it would be impossible to secure it back in), but hopefully I'm wrong and it isn't too difficult to remove/replace it while it's in the case-is this possible?