What thermal paste are you using?

The spoon method is really hard for me because user kinda have to give equal pressure to the spoon in order to apply good thermal paste. However, I am really bad at that for some reason. I always screw up that part, and have wasted GC extreme multiple time. Therefore, I prefer mx-4,, since I really don't have to do anything, except that I just have to put heasink and screw back in the correct order.

 

I've never used the spudger. Line across the die for the CPU, pea in the center for GPU. The heatsink does all the work after that.

 

Well today, I've learned a good lesson from you guys
From now on, I do not have to waste my GC extreme!

 

Yeah, I had some trouble with their little plastic spatula as well. Papusan is right, though; it's not necessary. I managed to get slightly better temps by not using it.

 

Liquid Ultra for my gpu's and cpu - have had this application for about 6 months now. Dropped temps by about 7C across the board.

 

Temp drops may vary from model to model. We usually see around 4 to 8 C lower when using IC Diamond compared to stock paste. Sometimes a little bit higher. I suppose it also depends on what the manufacturers use as their stock compounds to compare it to.

 

Never had a problem at home with ICD or AS5, haven't had to use anything else.

 

Or their application of it. Of all the good things I have to say about Latitudes and Precision notebooks, Dell cannot apply thermal paste if it saved their lives. For some reason, they go with the "lets just empty the syringe onto the die" philosophy when it comes to thermal paste.

 

Same here; Galinstan (=CLU) for everything. Had almost 10 tubes worth of the stuff, but sadly it's almost gone now. Use it also to fix other people's Toshibas and Mac-thingies, you see . Four small strips of electrical tape cozily surrounding the die is all it takes to make it safe (too viscous to wiggle itself underneath the tape).

Anyway, need to re-stock, but problem is shipping to Europe needs a forwarding service, so the 30 gr option has a bit of a markup. Would order a larger batch, but the next step is 1 kg (free shipping!), which may be a bit overkill ...

Thinking ... those oil-submerged desktops weren't all that when it came to cooling, but who knows what a (properly insulated) galinstan-submerged system could do . Let's see ... an E-ATX would need about 40 L, so that's around a measly 250 kg of galinstan ($400,000). Ok ... maybe not, but how's a water-cooling set, except substituting it with galinstan? Entire plumbing in full copper and a heavier model pump should be all that's required to make that work .

 

It will be a similar pressure, if the compound separates from heatsink pressure it's an incredibly poor paste.

I stopped spreading out the paste myself after the athlon XP.

 

No I was actually talking about the act of thinning out pastes by warming them up before using them. As it drifts away from the paste consistency, who's to say that the distribution of the compound isn't affected?

 

Again, the paste should be designed not to separate when it is warmed. However I have never needed to do that. A little bit of manual assistance when putting the heatsink in place gets me the perfect spread.