Thermal Paste

[wongb18c]

I recently bought a tube of thermal paste and put it on my cpu.. I noticed no change in temp from idle to full mode. Temp actually were a few degress hotter.... I'm wondering if it's my heatsink or did I put it on wrong? I only put a thin coat on the cpu it self and also another very thin coat on the sink where they come in contact.
I bought some arctic silver 5 since it pretty much received all good reviews of at least a drop in 5 C from most people who bought them from newegg, but it's not working for me. Anyone has any suggestions? Btw I'm using the sink that came with my processor.

 

[Nubius]

1. You should have gone to the AS5 website for proper instructions on how to apply the grease if you didn't in the first place.

2. You didn't need to put the extra layer on the heatsink also..this may be causing too much grease and may cause your temps to now be higher.

3. There is a chance you could have seated it wrong and a better reseating would give you better temps, but remember....AS5 needs like 200 hours of burn in time before it gets to it's stable level and you see your final temperatures. 200 hours is a lot of time, but generally within 1-2 weeks you can start to see the temp drop a couple degrees.

4. If it's a stock heatsink did you make sure to remove the thermal pad on the bottom because generally stock heatsinks come with those and you DO NOT want to put grease on an existing thermal pad. Unforunately, before I knew about computers when I switched mobo's, the loser at the computer store didn't know this and put a glob of paste on the CPU die then squished on the heatsink which resulted in the grease covering the connectors near the core and shorting the CPU (luckily it survived but the system would crash up until I got that crap cleaned up right)

All in all you're not guaranteed to see 5C drop especially since all you did was change the grease and not get an aftermarket heatsink or anything of that nature. I'd suggest you look into an aftermarket heatsink because that AS5 at the VERY MOST will get you 5C drop and that'd be pretty damn good. It's very hard to just put on grease and see a temp drop unless you went from a very bad heatsink seating to a very good heatsink seating.

 

[Immortal]

Are you using your BIOS to monitor your temp or how?

 

[wongb18c]

Yea I agree... I thought it was my heat sink too..... but I really don't feel like spending money to buy another one... they can get expensive. So I figured I go for new thermal paste and get minimal temp drops the cheap way. I just put the stuff on like 3 hours ago so we'll see what happens.... if the temps don't go down I might have to put out the money to get a new sink.

I'm using both bios and a program to check temp. And I did go to the website and have read the instructions. I might be that I put on 2 layers... might be a little too much I don't know but both layers are very thin. My cpu has been around 45-50C all the time and I think that's too hot.

 

[zerozero]

Like Nubius said, give it time to settle. Use some very CPU extensive programs such as stress tests etc... this will help lower the time a little bit. What temp were you at before applying the paste in both idle and max....

 

[Nubius]

nah man with that CPU your temps are about right. lol infact looking at your setup it's almost exactly like my old one. MSI board with 2400+ XP and 5700 graphics card with 80gb hard drive and 300w power supply is what I had for a while lol. When I had my case with the side panels off and stock heatsink I was at 64C. After doing my case modding I got it down to 40C Idle, 44C if it was a hot day. Other than that, if you don't have any case fans, or you do, but it's only one or two and stock heatin...your temp is about where it should be. I figured my chip was running a bit hotter than normal and it really isn't, those 2400+'s seem to be in the 50's if you don't have adequate cooling.

The main thing about an aftermarket heatsink is your load temps not so much idle temps. Like before I'd go from 54C to 61 or 62C at load, when I got my SLK-900A heatsink, 80mm vantec tornado, and AS5, the load temperatures would only go up 2 degrees opposed to before it'd go up, 5, 6, 7, even more degrees up on load. It's because the heatsink absorbs the heat much quicker. So don't forget about that if you do buy an aftermarket heatsink. Your Idle temps will be like 2-5C lower, but it's the load temps that it really keeps down. Makes it so the difference between idle and load is only like 2C instead of 5+ that's how it is for me anyway. Load temp never goes more than 2C above idle.