Thermal Paste for non OC'ed P4?

[Ronin13]

I'm planning on getting the 2.0 P4 Northwood and will not be doing any overclocking.

As i understand it, the Northwoods run pretty cool and the stock cooler should be pretty good, but it comes with a thermal pad or something like that, right?

For my use, is this good enough?

Would I benefit in any way using Arctic Silver (or some other cooling paste)?

For those of you with Northwoods, what have you done?

Thanks

~Ronin

 

[Rooster286]

I have a P4 1.7 and Artic Silver helped a ton over stock, I got almost 3c cooler with it (i'm not running overclocked either).

 

[Ronin13]

Was there something on the HSF you had to remove first (like a thermal pad)?

If so, how?

~Ronin

 

[jonmcc33]

You can remove any thermal pad with the side of a credit card, that works well and won't scratch the heatsink.

 

[Mavrick007]

Lightly take off the thermal pad and then use some acetone or rubbing alcohol to take the left over residue off of the heatsink.
Once you take off the pad and clean off the heatsink, apply a small dab of some thermal paste to your P4 and then apply the hsf.

You probably don't need thermal paste but it will lower temps. If you are going to overclock, I would definitely add some paste.

 

[Slacker]

One thing to consider, once you install the processor using the thermal pad and run it, the pad has paraffin in it that melts and flows in to the microscopic voids in the surface of the CPU and heatsink, you will never get back to a virgin state, if you plan to use paste, do it before running the CPU with the pad, the paste wont work as well if the paraffin has already worked in to the cpu/heatsink.

Anybody know if some type of solvent could clean the cpu/heatsink and remove the paraffin? I have a tube of arctic silverIII sitting here but haven't used it because I have already installed the CPU with the thermal pad before the AS3 arrived.