QUICK question for thermal compound

vtohthree

Senior member
Apr 18, 2005
701
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I'm troubleshooting my cousin's computer, basically it doesn't even boot, he bought a brand new opteron 146, and a brand new gigabyte ULi board... already ruled out that its any kind of hard drive problem or ram or psu(tested it on other systems).

So its either the board, or the cpu.

So we took out the cpu from the board(stock HSF), we were going to quickly put his cpu in another 939 board and put the HSF back on and see if it booted to see for sure if it was that...

Can I put the heatsink fan back on the cpu without wiping/reapplying, or is it safe to just do it, especially since this is only to see for a few minutes if it boots or not?

I can wait till tmrw morning for this, so thats why I'm asking, instead of going through the messy and tedious process of wiping the cpu+HSF clean and then reapplying just to test it, then doing this all over again when it gets placed in another permanent board .

Thanks guys.

*edit: when I say, "it doesn't boot", I mean, it gets a black screen, so it does power up...
 

Conky

Lifer
May 9, 2001
10,709
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It's definitely safe to reuse the thermal goop if you are only testing it to see if it works.