Is it OK for a thermal pad to have a few specks of dust on it?

I bought a replacement heatsink for my ThinkPad on ebay. The heatsink was placed between 2 pieces of cardboard, so that the 2 thermal pads were touching the cardboard and had some dust on them. I tried to use some alcohol pads to gently wipe most of the dust off, although there may still be a few specks of dust on them. Is that OK? One of the thermal pads is for the GPU, and the other is for the northbridge.

 

That's what I do. I usually use a cotton swab with some alcohol on it to wipe them clean. I'm sure some will insist on changing them but I don't think a couple of specs of dust will make a difference.

 

It's not going to make a noticeable difference.


I always have replacement thermal paste on hand with which I replace all the stock thermal pads with for better temperatures which would lower your temps, but unless you are pushing your unit and want lower temps, or are always doing hardware upgrades, not be worth the effort for a one time thing.

We were "taught" for years that careful application (using the minimal amount of paste necessary) yielded the best performance. Turns out that independent tests show that a large variation in the application style makes very little difference, and most variations fall within the stardard error. The biggest differences were comparing stock thermal pads to aftermarket performance pastes, but even those had only minor differences between each other benefiting only those who are performance overclockers.