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How to install Thermal Paste

2013-03-08
hey guys you're watching Jays two cents and if there's one thing I've learned about all the messages I've gotten over the past couple of weeks is that many of you are getting ready to take on your very first computer build a lot of you are taking on this endeavor for your very first time which is why this episode of a little bite of tech is all about applying thermal paste first of all you're going to have to make sure that you have appropriate thermal grease right here I'm just using some cheap thermal take for the sake of the video here but I do recommend it Arctic silver 5 or a s 5 or any sort of silver compound because it conducts heat very very well there's three major techniques when it comes to applying thermal paste the first one I'm going to show you here is the P method and what you want to do is you want to put just enough thermal paste in the center about the size of a pea trying to get it as round as possible and what's going to happen here is as you place the heat sink onto the motherboard it's going to evenly dispersed or displace the thermal compound on the CPU because it's most important to make sure that you can get a nice even application of thermal grease onto the CPU and one thing I want to point out before we take off this heatsink here and see how well that thermal paste spread out over the heat spreader this technique does not make a difference if you're using intel or AMD or even if you're putting thermal paste on some graphics cards heat sinks or some water blocks all of the fundamentals here when it comes to spreading out the thermal compound is the same regardless of the application so let's go ahead and take off the heat sink here and see how well the P methods spread out over the CPU and as you can see right there it's pretty and he's it's got a pretty good adhesive factor okay okay we're going to go ahead and call that one a blooper it took this the CPU right out of the socket with it okay we got the heatsink off and as you can see here this is one of the reasons why I'm not a fan of the P method if you take a look at the edges here you can see that you do not have complete coverage of the heatsink on the CPU so this would have actually led to an overheating situation in the CPU because this much of it would not have been cooled this would have probably not caused any damage but you would have noticed higher than desirable temperatures okay we've cleaned off the grease and the next method we're going to go ahead and do here is the line method basically just like it sounds you take the thermal paste and you put a nice even line of thermal compound across the top of the heat sink or the heat spreader this stuff isn't the greatest quality as you can see here it kind of globbed out at the end but if you use high quality thermal paste that's not going to really be an issue okay we've got our we've got our heatsink on here it's nice and tight it's what you said go ahead and take this off now and see how well the line method or method number two spread out here on the heatsink and once again it took the CPU right out with it this is alright so there's the line method right there you can see half of it's on the heatsink half it's on the processor but once again as you can see here we do not have complete coverage on the CPU heat spreader okay and last but not least we're going to go ahead and do the ex method it's just like the line method only you're going to make an X across the top of the heatsink what the idea of the X is is that it's supposed to help it get into the edges or the corners a little bit more okay as you can see here we've got better coverage on the heat spreader I'm going to go ahead and chalk this one up to being crap thermal paste from thermal tape recommend that stuff at all but I definitely do recommend the ex method because it does get better coverage so there you have it a nice quick and easy video from Jai's two cents about the proper way of installing thermal paste on your CPU or GPU or whatever you are doing get it now I can already hear some of you guys jumping right out of my screen saying hey wait a minute here on your water cooling video you did a whole different method with the credit card or the business card and you spread it all out over the heat sink I went ahead and decided not to show that method because there's a couple of reasons why some people would say you shouldn't do that one it can introduce air pockets into the thermal paste when it gets kind of churned up and if air gets caught in between there then it causes overheating issues I've been doing it for years I'm very comfortable with it but I don't want to mislead anybody into doing something that could have potentially damaged their computer and to some of you guys got really angry about that and practically chastised me so I don't want to go through that again anyway I'm going to get on out of here you've been watching Jays two cents and this has been a little bite of tech bringing you short little YouTube videos giving you guys the power to build and customize your own pcs get out of here and go build something do it do it now
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