Thermal paste or thermal pad

[gnasher]

My Athlon 64 3700+ retail just arrived, with a nice cooler and a thermal pad. Seemed odd. Sure enough, the AMD still says that thermal pads are recommended for lidless processors, but not for lidded processors - like the Athlon 64.

On the other hand, heat is heat and AMD put the pad in the box. Is it better to scrapeit off and put thermal paste, or carry on. I might overclock it just a little

 

[daven1986]

most people would say use isopropyl alcohol to remove the pad and use some arctic silver.

 

[Roll]

Paste used to be clearly better than the stuff pre-applied to heatsinks, but the material being used by many of the manufacturers has improved a lot recently and the difference is less.

If you're looking for the highest possible overclock and every single degree of temperature difference is important to you then clean it off and use Arctic Silver, if not just go with the stuff which is already applied.

Hope this helps.

 

[Topitoff]

Another vote for using the AS5 because:

I've never been able to get the stock heatsink/fan off an A64 without dragging the cpu out of the socket even when warm and with a lot of twisting; the pad sticks too much.

So removing the heatsink with AS5 on it is a lot less tramatic as the cpu usually don't come with it.

My 2ps worth.