Copper or Aluminium CPU and heatsink. HELP?

[Ant2311]

 

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5567. To improve its performance I got some thermal grizzly conductonaut, but it turns out that you can't use it with Aluminium. How can I find out if the tops of my CPU and GPU or the heatsink are made with Aluminium?

[Wh0_Am_1]

Are you asking about how to tell whether your current heatsinks have aluminum or copper, or are you trying to find a new one?

[Ant2311]

I'm trying to find out if my current heatsink is made of Aluminum 

[Christophe Corazza]

Very simple: if your heatsink looks brown-ish, it’s copper and if it’s grey then it is probably aluminium. Though in the latter, there is a very small chance it can have a nickel plating.

[Ant2311]

Looking online this is what my heatsink should look like. How would I go about safely applying the thermal "grease"?

[Imglidinhere]

3 hours ago, Ant2311 said:

Looking online this is what my heatsink should look like. How would I go about safely applying the thermal "grease"?

There is ZERO reason to use such a high end thermal paste on that laptop. I'm sorry but you will not gain any crazy performance levels from using liquid metal TIM. Use something like GC Extreme or IC-7. It's cheaper, safer, and ultimately better in the majority of use-cases.

[Ant2311]

6 hours ago, Imglidinhere said:

There is ZERO reason to use such a high end thermal paste on that laptop. I'm sorry but you will not gain any crazy performance levels from using liquid metal TIM. Use something like GC Extreme or IC-7. It's cheaper, safer, and ultimately better in the majority of use-cases.

How would the alternatives be better? I wouldn't really call it high end, it costs about $2 more

[Imglidinhere]

17 hours ago, Ant2311 said:

How would the alternatives be better? I wouldn't really call it high end, it costs about $2 more

The alternatives aren't electrically conductive, meaning if you spill some on the motherboard you aren't completely screwed. You do that with LM? Oh your machine is fuuuuuucked.