Heatsink's Thermal Pad

PaperPlunger

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I just got a 4600+ delivered today, and I love it. The heatsink it comes with is wonderful, but I had a question. The thermal pad on it didn't feel like one to me (never touched one before, so I had no idea) and I smudged the paste on it, so that an area about half a centimeter is bare, meaning the paste is no longer there. Is this that big of a deal, I'm stressing about it, or whether I should go out and buy a little thermal paste. Thanks in advance
 
There is no need to add thermal compound to a stock pad.

You should not touch the thermal compound/pad with your bare skin, it introduces skin oils which is not good.

Now that you've contaminated it I would suggest removal and applying Arctic Silver 5
 
No, it won't hurt the cpu unless it overheats.

But yeah, take it off again and clean the cpu die and the bottom of the heatsink with alcohol to remove the thermal paste and then reapply some arctic silver 5...very very little.
 
i decided to follow my own directions, and used a plastic id to spread the as5 out on the entire cpu, and it apparently worked well because i have an athlon64 3200+ overclocked to 2.5ghz from 2.0ghz and it's at 29 degrees celsius right now, never gets above 36 at load.
 
sweet, but did you ever try the other wway? Because who knows, you might be runnning at 30 degrees if you followed the directions ;)

It's just one of those things, you never know until you try. I'm not going to take my chances though, I'll just stick with whatthey say for my first build :p
 
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