Is thermal compound necessary

[kimjaeyoon]

Are there going to be problems if I don't use thermal compound?

[Sexy Vanilla Freshness]

Depends on whether you consider overheating to be a problem.

[nanowatt]

Do you wipe after you poop?

Ofc it is....

[loccilucas]

Yes you will have massive overheating issues.

[antoainb]

Yes, it is necessary. It'll overheat to death if you don't use it.

[BlargKing]

Just the problem of overheating until either thermal protection shuts your machine off or your machine just dies outright.

[harrynowl]

There is a reason it's provided/pre-applied to pretty much every cooler

 

Yes it's necessarily unless you have lots of money to throw at replacing your CPU everytime it burns up

[Raxzer]

Without a thermal compound, transferring heat from the CPU to the cooling-solution won't be efficient enough.

[leign]

thermal compound is necessary to effectively and efficiently transfer generated heat from the CPU to the heatsink or waterblock of your chosen cooling solution.

[LogicalDrm]

Neither CPU surface or heatsink contact surface are perfect. Thermal paste is there to fill those imperfections and provide contact between the two.

[LemonSpice]

if you want a fried cpu than sure you dont need it. In all seriousness most coolers today come with thermal compound and if yours does not it would be necessary to buy some

[ManWithBeard1990]

Because most CPUs these days do include some form of thermal protection, it'll probably work without it, but it'll be very hot even at the very lowest of speeds it can throttle down to. Even though a metal surface appears flat and sometimes even shiny, it's far from perfect, and the far from perfect surface on the bottom of the heatsink will not quite match up to the far from perfect surface of your CPU's integrated heat spreader (the metal lid on the CPU itself). The result of this is that most of the surfaces is separated by an ever-so-thin layer of air, which is not a very good heat conductor. Thermal paste is a paste that will fill up all these nooks and crannies when applied correctly and is specially formulated with a high thermal conductivity. So yes, a heatsink-processor interface without paste may be able to dissipate about 10 watts of heat or so, but that's nowhere near the TDP of a modern processor. You don't need the highest end thermal paste. The difference between the best and the worst paste is less than ten degrees C. Just get some.

[Mojo-Jojo]

Interested in why this question's being asked.

[Captain_Slow]

it's not necessary at all

 

 

 

 

 

if you can properly solder your cpu to your heatsink.

[ATI-Sucks]

You'll be fine, if you downclock the CPU to 500KHz.

[Spannerhands]

Are there going to be problems if I don't use thermal compound?

 

Yes