Is new thermal paste really essential?

I just OCed my HD 5850 to 5870 native clocks. Is reapplying thermal paste necessary? It seems like alot of people get away with not having to reapply the thermal paste.

Kojaku

 

Its not essential but it may be after having the laptop for a very long time and you see temps spike.

 

Well, as long as your temps ar ok there's no need to exchange it imo.

 

It's not really needed but imo, buy one then you can apply when cleaning dust inside your lappie

 

How often does it have to be applied? And what's a good paste I can buy at iono...Best Buy or something?

 

1. Are new tires for your car really necessary and essential? - Yes, but only whenever the old ones are used out or if their quality is bad.

2. How do you know your thermal paste might need replacing? - High temperatures are the main indication.

3. How often you need to change? - Refer to 2.


I personally wouldn't touch the old one unless there is really a reason to! It might in fact get even worse.

 

Neccessary? No. Recommended? Absolutely. You have to remember that thermal interface material (or TIM) is used to provide a thermal conduit between the CPU die and the cooler. Replacing old TIM or re-applying it after removing a cooler is the number one way to avoid high (and potentially damaging) temperature spikes during heavy system loads.

I would recommend Arctic Silver 5 or IC7 Diamond for thermal compounds.

 

No, it is not necessary.

It's usually done more on overclocked desktop computers, where you are fighting a battle of overclocking vs overheat, and need to squeeze every little bit of cooling that you can out of your cooling setup. On a laptop, it's usually only worth it if you're anal retentive and want the personal satisfaction of knowing that your laptop is running as cool as it can. On a laptop, you will probably never notice the difference in real-world situations.

There are companies out there that sell their own brand / formulations of thermal paste that have been shown to be better heat conductors than generic brands of thermal paste. The most popular of these over the past few years is Arctic Silver 5, which has been shown to reduce temps anywhere from 0C - 5C when compared to generic thermal pastes. Of course, if you already have decent thermal paste on your CPU / GPU, then applying something like Arctic Silver 5 will have little to no improvement.

Applying new thermal paste will require you to open your laptop, remove your current CPU / GPU cooler, clean off the existing thermal paste using 90% isopropyl alcohol and a lint-free cloth (like a gauze pad), and applying a TINY amount of thermal paste to the CPU / GPU before remounting the cooler. It takes about 200 hours for the compound to cure and set, after which your temps will be stable.

 

Forgot to add: Applying Arctic Silver 5 to the CPU and GPU of my previous laptop brought absolutely no positive effect.

 

When did you apply AS5 relative to your laptop purchase? Are you sure that there are no gaps in the GPU to cooler? A lot of coolers have significant gaps and hence need a thick pad to make contact with the GPU.

 

And it had the very negative effect of sucking up your time, and adding the risk that something would go wrong and cause damage to your laptop.

On a laptop, replacing the thermal paste is usually only worth it if you're anal retentive and want the personal satisfaction of knowing that your laptop is running as cool as it can. Realistically, people will probably never notice the difference in real-world situations.

 

Actually, YES you do need to replace your TIM when you remove your heatsink.
Basically, whenever you remove it and try to place it back on you *AT BEST* introduce a lot of little bubbles which hinder heat transfer and cause hot pockets which will make your chip run hot.
At *WORST* it will cause damage.
TIM's are CHEAP and easy to work with, so there is really no reason not to use it.
As for those that don't notice a difference it could be because your factory application was good enough for you usage (you did not push yours to the extremes) or you did not apply your TIM correctly.


I have used Arctic silver 5 for years but just recently switched to IC7.
I have to say that I really like IC7 and have noticed a large improvement with my cooling.

When my 920xm and 2x 5870's were at idle, both TIM's performed the same but once I started using them (P95, WPrime, FuzzMark etc..) is where I noticed the difference.

When OC'ing my 920xm with Arctic Silver 5 it would jump to 100C in a heartbeat, but with IC7 it will slowly rise and stop at ~90C.

Same with my 5870's. With AC5 it would jump up to 110C but with IC7 they rise slowly and my main stops at ~83C while my secondary stops at just over ~100C (I need to redo my secondary as I think it is not seated as good as it should be... hence the ~20C difference)

Just my 0.00000002¢

D.

 

a) there is no such thing as 'over cooling' a laptop

b) overheating a cpu/gpu will kill it dead, all it takes is a few seconds for some chips

c) thermal paste is cheap

d) applying thermal paste takes no time at all

 

a) True

b) True, but only technically true. Although most chips have thermal protection on them, that will trigger a halt / shutdown of the system once the temperature reaches a certain level. It is very unlikely that a stock CPU / GPU running at stock speeds and stock voltages will ever suffer damage from heat.

In reality, a laptop that is at risk for being damaged by overheating probably has a heatsink that has fallen off, or a fan that has stopped working. Applying one brand of thermal paste vs. another brand will not save a chip that is at risk of being damaged by overheating. Once a chip gets to the point where the temp is 100C or above, then something else is drastically wrong with the laptop that simple thermal paste cannot fix.

c) True.

d) False. It may be easy to apply new thermal paste on your system, but there are many systems where you need to disassemble the entire laptop to get to the CPU / GPU heatsink and fan. That is a pain in the butt.

Even if it only took me 10 minutes to apply new thermal paste, that is 10 minutes that I could be spending doing something else that is actually productive.

 

Yes and No.

For older laptops - hell yes. For new laptops - only if you are bored.

My situation - 4 year old MBP, replaced paste with IC7 Diamond and temps dropped by nearly 9C. This was the old paste.



For a new laptop - again only if you are bored. As such I was bored and opened my brand new 3D Envy - replaced with IC7 Diamond - after a good 2 weeks temps dropped only around 1....maybe 2C idle and no change in load. This was the old paste.

 

I agree 100%. Anytime you remove the cooler from a CPU or VGA chip, you should always clean off the old TIM and re-apply with new. However, that is not a hard and fast rule, more like practicing some good ole fashioned preventitive maintenance (and common sense!).

 

Thermal paste can harden over time so its never a bad idea to replace it after an extended period of owning your laptop.

That being said, going with a high performing thermal paste is probably more beneficial in laptops than it is in desktops as laptops tend to run hotter. If I can take a few degree's off my full load temperature, its very likely I'm increasing the life of all the components in my laptop. Heat is the enemy of electronics.

I can't see why anyone would say its a bad thing other than a potential waste of $10 and a bit of time. In some laptops, like my m15x, its a 10 minute job to replace thermal paste. In some laptops its a couple hour job as you have to tear the entire laptop apart to replace the compound. Its up to the owner to decide whether its worth it.

Its a lot like running a notebook cooler. Its a great insurance policy that has the likely chance of increasing the life and possibly the performance of your computer. It also has the likely chance of decreasing the opportunity of failure of your components.

When removing a heatsink its critical to replace the compound as re-using the old compound is very likely to create air bubbles between your CPU/GPU and the heatsink. The whole point of using thermal compound in the first place is to get rid of air bubbles in order to transfer heat to the heatsink most efficiently.

 

Tell me about it. I repasted my friend's Z series Sony. Had to take the whole laptop apart, biggest waste of 2 hours of my life. Plus what takes Sony 400 screws to put a Z series together, Dell does it with 40.

Yes I can definitely attest to different thermal paste can make a huge difference. My T7500 in my Vostro 1500 dropped by putting Arctic Silver 5 over some crappy Cooler Master Thermal Fusion 400 paste. I'm talking about a 2C on idle and up to 8C on full load. I might go repaste my T7500 again with the IC Diamond, that stuff is amazing being only at cost 3 bucks for me.

 

Sony's are some of the worst laptops to take apart. Worst. Especially the smaller ones. Take the computer apart all the way down to the motherboard just to add RAM or replace the HDD? Yuck..

Dells, in a lot of cases, can be some of the best to take apart. Especially older Dells come apart like a Lego set.

 

I know lol. Whenever there's any Sony in the queue...nobody wants to touch it. I had to do 3 screen replacements on 3 different Z series models. All of them require you to gut the notebook for a screen replacement. I can do most Dell screen replacements in under 10-15 minutes.

Also I had to upgrade RAM on a very old Sony notebook, can't remember the model name. Turns out I had to gut the entire notebook, flip the motherboard over and turns it was MicroDIMM and I couldn't even install the RAM. Very happy camper after 3 hours of work.

I love fixing the older Dells, very easy to strip down to and do pretty much anything, and are all the same/relatively same design.

 

Your workplace sounds exactly like mine! lol. We have one guy that does most of the teardowns but everyone tries to avoid the Sony's and Toshibas.

Then you get the weird ones like Lenovos where the disassembly guides say to squeeze on both sides until the latches around the touchpad pop up lol. Those ones are always fun.

 

UGggg, don't get me started on my wife's 7 year old ultra portable sony vaio.

Had to replace her cooling fan (only one in the system) 3x since I kept getting bad ones off of *bay (they sprayed them with WD40 so they would work for ~week before failing)

That thing takes forever to take apart and you have to remove so many ribbon cables, small pcb boards etc.. just to do a simple fan replacement, ram replacement (MicroDimm) or HD replacement (1.8" drive)

Oh, and having to insert a small non-conductive rod into small holes in the underside just to 'pop' out the keyboard

D.