Heatsinks and thermal paste and Thunderbirds OH MY

[Guest]

Well, today all of my new computer things I ordered are arriving in the mail. I'm so excited! I've installed and set-up different components/aspects of computers before, so I'm not a complete idiot, but this will be my first time building one from scracth. So, for all you tech gods out there here's some questions I have:

I bought a AMD thunderbird 850mhz and the 8kta3 epox motherboard. I also ordered this fan:
http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=35-103-115-01.JPG

So anyways to my question; I'm really not sure how to install this fan. Do you clip it in over the chip? If so, I know how to do that. But, do I need to apply thermal paste before attaching the HSF? If I do, how do I apply it? From what I gather you spread a thin layer, but I'm not quite sure where to do this. Do you spread layer on the CPU or on the part of the heatsink that rests of the cpu? And what the hell is thermal tape?

thanks for your time, I hope I wasn't to confusing
-jono

 

[broggiemonster]

most heatsink/fans have a bit of thermal transfer compound on the back...this will be a small pink square. Thermal tape is not for use with cpu's..it's main use seems to be for fixing heatsinks to ram chips. For thermal compound instructions...particularly Arctic silver, which is the BEST thermal transfer compound available bar none see www.arcticsilver.com

Hope this helps

Ray

 

[Guest]

I just got my stuff! Yay! So anyways HSF came with some Silicon Heat Sink Paste. So I can just use that right?

thanks again
jono

 

[Guest]

Bic,
Check out the thread just below this one entitled "First Time Athlon Installation". It has some good information and links on this subject.