Is a thermal pad or thermal paste a must for heatsink install?

[fatbaby]

I'm about to get a new amd mobo+cpu and is worried if it goes bad, will i be able to return it if there is some thermal paste on the chip?

 

[bozo1]

yes it's a must. You should have no warranty problems.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

well it is very easy to clean off there should only be a tiny amount of thermal paste (or artic silver etc) and can be easily wiped clean.

The thermal pads become somewhat 'gooey' once they ahve been used can be removed easily with wd40.

 

[clumsum]

It would be harder to return the chip (cpu) with obvious signs of overheating ............ and no paste or tape residue on the die.

You need one or the other for proper cooling or you risk overheating and/or damage.

 

[Soulflare]

Do you need to get thermal paste along with a retail cpu (which includes a heatsink),
or are the "bits" already "treated"?

 

[AluminumStudios]

I have a question to add to this thread.

Radio Shack sells silcone thermal transfer compound (white heat sink grease as I usually call it.) How crappy/good is it?

 

[VTrider]

<< I have a question to add to this thread.

Radio Shack sells silcone thermal transfer compound (white heat sink grease as I usually call it.) How crappy/good is it? >>



Although I usually use 'premium' stuff like Artic Silver II and the such, I have used the radio shack stuff plenty of times also. It works, it works fine - I would even go as far to say that it works just as good if not better than many of the hyped up stuff you see in these circles. When I was anal and did some temperature reads of different pastes, the difference was always just a few degrees higher/lower - pretty insignificant if you ask me. 10-15 degrees hotter is probably a significant difference, and you'll probably see posts after this of people saying that the radio shack stuff runs that hot - fat chance IMHO.

-Vtrider

 

[Colt45]

I use RS grease all the time. No problems.
I'm sure arctic silver knocks off a few degrees, but unless youre going for a crazy OC i cant see ~4 degrees being much of a difference

 

[WarCon]

During my thermal compound testing, I ran the new Radio Shack compound and it just flat sucks. It half-way dried out in 6 hours. It also made me lower my overclock from 1400 (which every other compound I tested was stable at) to 1370, just to be able to run the tests (which lowering the speed actually invalidated the comparison data, but I didn't care as I didn't even finish the test because my system was behaving poorly). Anyway, after I removed the waterblock I noticed the base (silicone most likely) had destabilized from gel to liquid and ran down the waterblock.

Older Radio Shack paste was probably just a standard zinc oxide thermal compound, but the new stuff is not acceptable for AMD use IMHO. It is pure crap.