Thermal pad or grease?

[TRDCorolla1]

When you buy the Athlon 64 processor, does it come with a thermal grease that you can apply or thermal pad already stuck on the bottom of the heatsink?

 

[DarkBlade1]

Hmm, don't know. I always go OEM on processors, and then apply Artic Silver 5 to them, it keeps things really really cool!

 

[trance565]

it comes with the little pad, but i have aftermarket so i got arctic silver 5 or wutever

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Is Arctic Silver the grease kind?

 

[trance565]

ya, its a paste/grease, kina feels like jb weld, cept it doesnt harden... good stuff saves ur cpu i think 2-5 C

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Ok, I think what I'm going to do is once I get the prcoessor in, I"m going to strip the pad off and apply the Arctic Silver thermal grease on there. I've never done that before so how would I effectively take off the old thermal pad without scratching it or making a mess out of it?

 

[trance565]

mmm leave it, cuz all it is is just a bit stiffer thermal paste, and when putting the paste on, use like a wedge tool,/butter knife to put it on evenly
lol im usin ati tool to get my max mem/core speeds i can oc my gfx card to, then mebbe i can play games a bit better so rite now my comp is kina slow

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Went to the Arctic Silver website and found this great DIY on apply thermal grease and how to remove thermal padding. I guess I can use alcohol to rub off the remaining residue under the heatsink.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm

Now the reason why I am concerned about this is this:

AMD's website has a tech document that says the Athlon 64 and Opteron MUST use thermal grease and not thermal pad.

That makes me think why it comes retail with padding on the bottom then?! Strange.

 

[trance565]

well, its not really pad, its grease but, it looks like a pad lol, i looked at mine, its grease just done too neatly, so it looks like pad lol
gd machines, put on sucha thin layer and all lol

 

[TRDCorolla1]

So it's actually grease then? They all look the same to me. Most of the processor install I've done always have the pads and like you said, very neat squares. I expect thermal grease to be a bit sloppy. So how can you tell it's grease?