Thermal Paste Already On Heat Sink

If you see areas of gray looking material on a copper plate the thermal paste has already been applied.

Thermal paste already on heat sink.

Thermal paste is applied to the cpu and heat sinks to improve their ability to cool down and conduct heat efficiently. Arctic mx 4 8 grams thermal compound paste carbon based high performance heatsink paste thermal compound cpu for all coolers thermal interface material 4 8 out of 5 stars 3 018 11 99 11. A good heat sink can be crippled by a mismatched thermal compound. This serves as a heat sink designed to distribute heat from the processor itself to a cpu cooler as well as provide protection to the processor inside.

It s really easy to spot too. A layer of thermal paste or thermal grease will form a complete coating over the top of the component. This provides much better heat transfer to the heat sink. This is the part of the cpu that is still exposed after being installed in a motherboard and is the surface to which you apply thermal paste.

Some heat sinks will actually come with thermal paste already applied in this case. Thermal paste also called thermal compound thermal grease thermal interface material tim thermal gel heat paste heat sink compound heat sink paste or cpu grease is a thermally conductive but usually electrically insulating chemical compound which is commonly used as an interface between heat sinks and heat sources such as high power semiconductor devices. Sometimes you actually don t need to apply thermal paste if you bought a cpu heat sink combo. Top comment no mess no fuss got the job done the thermal paste works as it should it was the only one bestbuy near me sold a bit more than i wanted to spend on paste but it does the trick doing maintenance on computer worked great after removing cooling fan and cleaning fan motor heat sink i applied the thermal paste and used the center drop method the compound was the proper.

With a pretty sufficient 8 5w mk thermal conductivity rating gc extreme has got all the capacity to handle efficiently and transfer it to the heat sink from your gpu. Thermal paste is a paste that contains either silicone and zinc oxide the cheaper versions or silver ceramic the more expensive ones. If you are looking for a thermal paste specifically for your graphics processor or graphics card you must go for gelid gc extreme thermal paste. Laird thermal paste image source.