Pentium 4 & Thermal Paste

[Alistair]

Probably a silly question -but I've never had anything but AMD chips before.

When I apply thermal paste (arctic silver 5) to my new P4 3.2 do I cover the entire silver surface of the CPU or do I just put a blob in the middle ?

[Swafe]

my mate runs one fine with no thermal paste at all, due to the heatspreader, but id say it would be wise to spread it all over

[shredisn@tdead]

Some people advocate plopping paste the size of a small grain of rice in the centre of the silver heat spreader and then plonking the HSF on top of this.

The HSF will then spread the paste about. In fact, take a look at the Arctic Silver website - they show just this with some nice pretty pictures

Personally I like to make sure the whole thing is very thinly covered (thin enough so you can just about see whats written on the CPU through it).

[Alistair]

thanks thin cover all over it is

[Platinum]

I put a thin layer everywhere, try not to get any in the little hole though

[Ceefer]

The 'little hole' is, I believe, just as a result of the manufacturing process to allow air to escape at some stage. I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter if you get thermal compound in it.

There's a pretty good set of instructions on the Arctic Silver website about how to correctly use their thermal paste, though I doubt if any of us actually go as far as the method described. Mainly it emphasises just what a thin layer of paste is required.

[Platinum]

I can only speak from experience, Ive seen a chip with AS3 in the hole and it failed to boot, cleaning the AS3 from the hole resulted in it booting :S