Thermal paste 3750k

joey666

Honorable
Dec 13, 2012
20
0
10,510
I need to use thermal paste on my 3750k because I took off heat sink I have cheap thermal paste I got from ebay would it be ok? I'm not goin to overclock and its a standard heatsink and when I'm putting on paste do I spread it or let it spread itself?
 
Solution
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO don't use that paste. It's probably based off a garbage silicon compound & will result in high temperatures. Drive to your local Radioshack, pick up a tube of Arctic Silver 5, it's like a 10$ paste that's very good & great for cooling (there are better ones, may I remind you), go back home, an put a small DOT on the center of your CPU, about the size of a grain of rice, and then put your heatsink on it, that'll naturally spread the paste out which is the BEST way to go about applying thermal paste. Also, do not forget to clean your processor and heatsink of the thermal paste that was on it before with an alcohol dipped paper towel, and dried with a...

payturr

Honorable
Dec 3, 2012
819
0
11,060
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO don't use that paste. It's probably based off a garbage silicon compound & will result in high temperatures. Drive to your local Radioshack, pick up a tube of Arctic Silver 5, it's like a 10$ paste that's very good & great for cooling (there are better ones, may I remind you), go back home, an put a small DOT on the center of your CPU, about the size of a grain of rice, and then put your heatsink on it, that'll naturally spread the paste out which is the BEST way to go about applying thermal paste. Also, do not forget to clean your processor and heatsink of the thermal paste that was on it before with an alcohol dipped paper towel, and dried with a microfiber cleaning cloth.
 
Solution

CDdude55

Distinguished
it's simply preference, some people spead it, some don't, some people put a pea sized dot etc. I personally just put a pea or rice sized dot and let the pressure form the heatsink do the job in speading it out.

As for getting cheap thermal paste off ebay, i'd say that fine. Granted there are a lot of differance types of thermal paste that, some that are conductive, some not and you have some that spread better etc. But overall they're all meant for the same purpose, so as long as it's on top of the CPU and something is speading it out like the heatsink then you can't really go wrong. The differance in CPU temps when going with a better thermal paste is generally very small to the point where it's not much of a relevent factor at most you might see a 1c-2c differance.