Do small scratches on HS make big temp. difference??

[mato7742]

i've got a thermalright slk900-a w/ a vantec tornado and my temps with the fan all the way up are around 40C idle. of course, however, i don't leave the fan all the way up when it's idle, i actually turn it down all the way with the vantec nexus and it goes up to about 45 idle when the room is warm. when i first got this hs a while ago i had trouble installing it and i think i made two minor scratches on the bottom of the hs directly above where the cpu goes. does anyone think this could be making a large difference on my temperatures?? these temps are only slightly better than what i was getting with the vantec aeroflow (a couple of degrees). should i sand down the hs to lower the temps?

 

[bacillus]

small scratches shouldn't adversely affect cooling performance if you've applied your thermal paste correctly.
is the hs mounted correctly?

 

[Peter D]

Small scratches are fine. The thermal paste is designed to fill in any "hills and valleys" in the heatsink base or CPU core as long as they aren't huge gouges 😉. If you're worried, you can put a little tiny dab of TIM on the base of the heatsink, put a plastic bag over your finger and rub the goo into the heatsink to fill any abnormalities.

BTW, You shouldn't be worried about those temps anyways, they're well within spec.

 

[mato7742]

i tried rubbing it in before, then i tried just globbing it on like the as5 website recommended for as5. they said the older versions of as needed to be rubbed in, but the new 5 is so thick that it doesn't. temps are around the same though. hmm. oh yeah, the as5 never brought down my temps any way i tried putting it on. any reason why?

 

[Soulkeeper]

hardly any unless they are a few mm wide