I touched the pre applied thermal paste on my cpu cooler, should I apply new thermal paste?

[JulianSen1]

See picture addedd

[Levent]

Nope.

[Dedayog]

No, coverage is still just fine.

[Spotty]

It'll be fine. It'll get squished once the cooler is applied to the CPU anyway.

[CT854]

The point of the thermal paste is to fill in any planar imperfections on the IHS to ensure maximal surface area for heat transfer. The very puprpose of the thermal paste is to be smushed, so any nonuniformity on the pre-applied paste is irrelevant.

 

You're fine.

[JulianSen1]

Thanks all, for the fast replies. Helps me a lot

 

 

[mariushm]

The recommendations to clean paste if you smudge too much is that oils from your skin can mix with remaining paste and reduce the efficiency of the thermal paste.

 

Also, if the layer of paste is thicker and your fingerprints make deeper grooves in the paste, in theory it's possible that when you apply heatsink over the cpu, air bubbles can form / can get trapped in those grooves and wherever there's air particles, the transfer between the two metal surfaces is poorer.

 

The same reason of air getting trapped between heatsink and cpu is why most recommendations are to put a big blob / pea size / corn size / whatever blob of thermal paste in the center because when you apply the heatsink to CPU, the blob gets squished and flows to the edges, pushing air away.  Same for an X  or  a few lines ... they're squished and will spread ...   just never a circle or something that would form "walls" or give air a place to be trapped (ex. inside the circle)

In real world, these are a concern for perfectionists, in real world these things affect the performance of a heatsink by an extremely low amount, hardly worth thinking about it.