3250 Thermal Pad

Hello

After my stock hard drive (Travelstar) died of the clank sound of death, I decided to get a new drive. After opening the innards, I decided also to clean the cpu area of dust and after removing the heatsink I noticed that it'd be a good time to apply new paste to the cpu and heatsink.

How do I go about doing this on this heatsink? Do I remove that plastic orange piece entirely and install a new pad? Or do I just clean the exposed portion (shaped like a rectangle that goes directly above cpu core) and place new paste onto it? This is my first time actually doing this and any help would be appreciated!

 

Just throw away the old thermal pad and the orange tape. Then use a good thermal paste such as Artic Silver. That's all. Google Artic silver and how to apply them correctly.
Besure to fasten the CPU heatsink screws evenly to motherboard.

 

cool thanks beut! I was too worried about having a gap if I used thermal compound instead of a thermal pad.

 

It can be a legitimate concern with some heat sinks. The heatsink in my 2371 (equivalent) cools both the CPU and the GPU. The factory install has paste on the CPU and a thermal pad on the GPU. The clamping screws are only over the CPU.

Removing the thermal pad and using only paste on the GPU would leave a gap. Shortened story: I created a solid copper shim to duplicate the demensions and thickness of the thermal pad and properly applied thermal paste to both sides of the shim. It dropped my typical GPU temp by approximately 10C. ... at the same time, using a quality product and applying it properly to the CPU gained me another 3-5C over the sloppy factory installation.

 

Don't worry. I use thermal paste to replace old thermal pad of Averatec all the time. If you apply the thermal paste properly, there's no problem.
I run Burning software to test the system in continuous 24 hours and there're no problem of overheating.