Can I reuse my heatsink / fan on new CPU?

[ahurtt]

I want to move from a single core Athlon 64 to a Athlon 64 X2 dual core on my old socket 939 system. When I originally built the machine I used a retail box CPU that came with the heatsink and fan. Now I am ordering the new dual core CPU but it is OEM. I am going to assume it's ok just to reuse my previous heatsink and fan for the new CPU. But do I need to do anything to it first? Like scrape off the little thermal pad and put on some new thermal grease or something? Or can I just slap it right on the new CPU?

 

[f4phantom2500]

yes, you can reuse it, there won't be any issues there. yes, you should remove the gunk from the bottom, and then rub the base with high percentage rubbing alcohol using a coffee filter or glasses cleaning cloth (or something else that won't leave lint). then rub the new cpu heatspreader with the alcohol, apply some thermal paste to the heatspreader of the cpu (you can find out how much is enough on arctic silver's web site, i think they have a bunch of pictures for that) and seat the heatsink, and you're done.

 

[ahurtt]

I heard a lot of people say that arctic silver stuff is all really just hyped up crap and it doesn't really work any better than that sticky pad thing they put on the stock heat sink you get when you buy a retail cpu. In fact some people have said it works worse if you read the product reveiws on Newegg. Do you think they just didn't know what the F!@k they were doing and applied it wrong or do you think just any old thermal grease will do the trick?

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Didn't see any improvement with AS5 vs the white grease from Zalman. They all perform the same when properly applied.