Stock thermal paste electrical conductivity

Hey, I posted this in the Lenovo manufacturer's thread, but I realized that it might be better off here and I have no idea how to move the other one so... I'm going to repost it here.

I recently replaced the thermal paste on my Lenovo Y400, when I was doing this, I found some stock thermal paste under a piece of clear plastic that covers the capacitors on the GPU, I was unable to get this thermal paste off, as I did not want to take the plastic off.

I was curious how bad this is, is the stock thermal paste conductive?

The laptop seems to be running fine, should I disassemble it again and try to clean the capacitors off?

Thanks,
Jake

 

It depends on what Lenovo uses, best bet though is that it isn't otherwise you would probably know very quickly after trying to do something using the GPU. From reading your post though it sounds like the paste was there to begin with, if that was the case maybe Lenovo has it there to cool down the caps, which is kind of odd.

 

I don't think that it was intentionally there, because it was only on one small part, not over all of the capacitors, and I agree, I think that I would have noticed, especially when I ran FurMark, during which I saw no artifacting, which I know is an indicator of a short due to thermal paste and I also saw relatively consistent temperatures of around 70C Max.

 

I have not seen conductive thermal paste in forever, some like AS5 are slightly capacitive which is not the same thing as conductive. If the temps are good, then there is no need to repaste.

 

That would make sense the way Lenovo applies thermal paste is to put that high density paste on the heat sink and just slap it on the motherboard, it was all over the CPU when I took it off. If it were conductive, Lenovo would get a billion RMAs for fried componets