do i HAVE to put thermal grease on my pentium d 3.0? i have a silent 775 and i heard that typically its not needed with fans that have a flat heatsink bottom
You should have some sort of thermal paste to aid the heat transfer between the heatsink and the heatspreader on your cpu. I would recommend AS5 (Arctic Silver 5). Here is a link to newegg which ships inside the US. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835100007
YES. shoot whoever told you that it isn't necessary. unless you lapped the HSF base yourself then it is unlikely to be perfectly flat. i guarantee you if you look through the documentation you should have received with your processor it will say something along the lines of "note: thermal interface material must be used between the heatsink and the processors heat spreader". i don't see why on earth you would skimp on a few dollars just because it may be "unnecesary" (false). you don't have to put petrol in your car but it certainly makes driving a lot easier
if i booted the comp with now heatsink on it and turned it off after 3 seconds it wont do anything to the processor right? because it is made to shut off if it gets too hot anyways right?
oops. my fault. i meant to say i booted it w/o fan and heatsink because i kept thinking when i put it on it was moving the processor slightly or tightening too hard on it (i have no choice. its a tt silent 775 thats a ***** to install). so yeah, with no heatsink or fan i booted for 3 secs and turned off. wouldnt it still be fine? doesnt mb know if processor is too hot?
Should be fine... But you can easily burn a processor in a few seconds with out a heatsink... Less than a second on my old AMD and it fried... Just a little test I was doing...