When choosing a thermal compound you want to find something with low thermal resistance, that is Heat easily passes through it. Something non conductive and non capacitive. So you don't short out anything on your motherboard and last but not least something that doesn't dry out over time. So that you don't lose performance a couple of years down the road when your system still running and your thermal compound still in there.
Before you actually start a thermal compound swap I would definitely recommend checking your temperatures because that way you'll be able to more easily diagnose if anything went wrong during the installation procedure.
First step is to remove your existing heat sink, revealing the old thermal compound underneath. You'll need isopropyl alcohol so you want to wet that onto a nice soft piece of cloth and then you want to clean the surface of the CPU as well as the bottom of the heat sink.
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Now you'll notice that you will not actually able to get it completely clean on the first go.
This is because your wipe is now too dirty to clean anything, So you need to find a clean spot put on some more alcohol and do another round with the isopropyl trying to remove the residue that was left from the first time of cleaning it.
So here we see our first pass and our second pass.
For the third pass I usually just use the toilet paper without putting any additional alcohol on it because we're trying to remove the little bits that are left behind not leave anymore which is easier when they're wet and then I usually finish off.
And you're welcome to use something else with just a quick pass with sleeve or a microfiber cloth to remove any remaining residue that might be left behind by toilet paper because those little bits can cause cooling problems and now you can see the surfaces are clean and ready to apply our new thermal compound.
Back when CPUs didn't have integrated heat spreaders we used to spread the thermal compound out across the die or the core in order to make sure that it covered the entire thing.
Now that we put so much mounting pressure on to our heat spreaders we can just put either a pea shaped blob in the middle or a rice green shaped line in the middle and we can rely on the mounting pressure of the heat sink to actually spread the thermal compound.
So these are known as the pea and the line method. I personally find the line method has the best consistency. FSor me but everyone has a different experience and it varies depending on the thermal compound the one thing to be aware of with the pea in the line method is that if you have a bigger CPU you're going to want to apply a bigger line of thermal compound or a bigger pea in the middle the CPU.
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Now that we have a fresh application of thermal compound and two nice shiny clean surfaces to put together we should be able to observe temperature improvements of anywhere from three to five degrees Celsius over the stock thermal compound when using an appropriate high-performance thermal compound.
So that was a quick and simple guide to apply thermal paste to your CPU. Thanks for stopping by, if you enjoyed it make sure you share this will all your techie friends and if you have any ideas for future posts, leave us a suggestion we will make sure to monitor and hopefully you'll see your idea soon. Until then do check out our other Posts.
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