Hi all, I was just wondering, with this fan/heatsink combo is the use of thermo paste suggested / required? I just installed it onto my latest experiment (AMD XP 3000+ BIOSTAR M7VIG 400 MB 1GB.Kingston pc3200 dual channel ddr,Rosewill 450w psu,2 maxtor mx7k 16m ata 133 h/d.s,2 NEC 3540a DVD+/- rw drives and a freebie NVIDIA G-force ti-4600) I noticed no mention on the Thermaltake instructions of using any compound for heat transfer. Is this because of the PCM45 interface material? I have fired it up as is and at idle the cpu runs at 38c and under load 43c is the highest temp. I have seen.Any suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated! B.W.
When using a heatsink always use a thermal paste (sometimes called goop). This thermal paste fills the small holes which appear in all solid materials. In this case the imperfections in the heatsink and the CPU are filled with the paste and this greatly improves the heat transfer. If you find that your Heatsink actually gets hotter when you use thermal paste, you are correct. The paste has increased the heat transfer and so the heat is now in the heatsink and not the CPU. This is much better for the Performance of the System as a whole
if the heatsink has a pad on it than leave it alone but remove the covering plastic strip off that pad before placing on the cpu.
Thanks for the replies and yes I did remove the plastic film from the heatsink pad before mounting it to the proscessor.I was curious about the benefits if any of using both the pad and the paste.
I think I'll leave well enough alone. The temps I'm seeing don't appear to be any cause for alarm. Thanks again for your help and Happy Holidays!
