• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

thermal pads safe for cpu?

Kotu

Kotu

Kotu

Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
886
Location
UK
I am just wondering if the none sticky thermal pads you can get for memory would be safe short term for none overclocked cpus as well?

Reason I ask is I want something I can use for testing cpus without all the thermal paste mess.
 
I don't have any sort of thermal compound between a Phenom II X2 555 BE (in spare computer) and stock cooler and I have temps in the 40-50s and high 60s when medium/high load is put on the CPU. So I would just go without them. I don't think they would be sufficient enough as their job isn't to transfer such high temperatures (their primary use is for cooling DRAM chips I think?) so I think you'd encounter some over heating problems. But then again I haven't seen this sort of thing tried before so someone else can comment on the matter.
 
If you're not going to use thermal paste then for very short term testing without overclocking you're probably as well using nothing instead of a thermal pad.
 
I haven't heard good things about the pads.

It's a shame since I thought the pads could have been a great concept to avoid any accidents (which is hard to happen anyway).
 
Its for old cpus of which the status is unknown, so no stress testing, more like testing to see if an unused motherboard+cpu combo actually turn on at all.

Using nothing at all works ok with modern cpus due to the big heat spreaders, but for stuff like socket A cpus, it ends up leaving a tiny core shaped imprint in the heatsink, in this case the thermal paste actually protects the heatsink from damage. I don't really want to be wasting thermal paste just to see if something turns on though :(
 
In my work place (fairly well known second hand retailer) we don't bother using thermal paste or pads. We just put the CPU under the heat sink and make sure it works.

We only need to turn the machine on and make sure the CPU works; stress testing isn't really required, so thermal paste isn't essential. 99.9% of the time a CPU either works or doesn't work, so that's why we don't stress test (as it wouldn't make business sense) and therefore that's why we don't spend an hour a day applying and mopping up thermal paste :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom