So the other day I replaced the thermal compound and applied arctic silver 5. I followed the less is more mantra, I put the heatsink back fired it up and I notice that SpeedFan says it's 10C hotter. I have re-applied it twice and it is the same. My question is, since my chip runs hotter to begin with, do I need to cover the whole chip and not just the little pea sized/rice sized ammount?
1.) Clean the CPU core and the part of the heatsink that contacts it. 2.) Put a small glob or line of the stuff on top of the cpu core 3.) Get a small, flat piece of plastic...use it to spread the stuff evenely all over the top of the core. Thinner is better; just make sure you have full coverage and you should be OK. 4.) Attach the heatsink 5.) Do a 'burn-in' test...use something like everest to max the CPU load for about a day. Step 5 is the most important step; it gets the stuff nice and hot so the spring force of the heatsink does a final "flattening" of the paste.
