How often to reapply thermal paste?

[rye10516]

Im using arctic silver 5 which i applied maybe 3 years ago and my temperatures seem higher now.

 

 

Should graphics card thermal paste ever be reapplied?

 

 

What about laptops?

 

 

If you remove the cooler and the paste is completely dry, is that a bad sign?

[Prestonification]

I would recommend doing so when you actually notice a change in temps after some time. Nothing you would need to do regularly. IMO.

Laptops I always change because they are always done like crap. gpus not so much.

[JamesPlayzGamesHD]

You should replace them every year. It's good to do it around summer time cause that's when it's hot out.

[AresKrieger]

If your temps go up for no reason consider changing it, otherwise don't bother.

[typographie]

11 minutes ago, rye10516 said:

If you remove the cooler and the paste is completely dry, is that a bad sign?

Well, it's a sign that it's a good time to re-apply. I think 3 years is long enough that you should probably take a look at it.

 

I don't really know how often it needs to be re-applied (I suspect it varies wildly depending on what thermal compound you use), but I tend to use new thermal compound about once a year or whenever I conveniently have my case open for something else.

 

As for video cards, everyone seems to have a different opinion. I think Linus did a video awhile back comparing temperatures with stock thermal material against new, and found that it didn't make much difference. I'd say that if you're seeing higher temperatures than you expect and you can't do anything else with your airflow, it might be worth a try. It's not likely to hurt anything.

[mariushm]

If you have the time and can be bothered, I'd say replacing the paste every 6 months or so would be a good idea. Once a year would be a good thing. However, it won't be a big deal if you don't replace it that often, if you can tolerate a bigger average temperature (by a few degrees).

 

I didn't replace the paste in my computer for probably more than a couple of years, the heatsink I have is kind of hard to detach so I only blew the dust between the heatsink blades when i had time (usually during power outages or when adding a hard drive to the system). Otherwise, my system stays on 24/7. Maybe when I upgrade my video card, I'd clean the cpu and apply thermal paste.

 

Very few people replace the thermal paste of video cards, some video cards even have "void if removed" stickers over screws because gpu chips are not packaged as well as regular cpus, they're more sensitive to pressure (if use screws the heatsink too tight on the video card) or can be chipped (again, if user re-applies the heatsink incorrectly). Also, often the video card uses thermal pads between the video card memory chips and the heatsinks and these thermal pads can be broken/ripped in several smaller pieces, which can make reapplying the heatsink harder. 

If you have the means, it wouldn't hurt to replace the thermal paste once a year or something like that, but my guess is the difference in video card temperatures would be small.

 

If the paste is completely dry, it's not always a bad sign. Some thermal pastes can be quite dry when cold but become semi-liquid when hot. Still, it wouldn't hurt to replace the paste.

 

Make sure you clean the surfaces well before applying new paste, use isopropyl alcohol (95% or better purity) or denatured alcohol, let the chips dry on their own and apply new thermal paste.

 

 

 

[LogicalDrm]

Temps seem to be higher or are higher? Temps going up can be from many things. Higher room temp, more dust, components getting old. If you feel like it, sure. I had my paste for 2 years and now 1 year and I haven't noticed any chance. For GPU I can't be bothered. Temps have never been so high that I would be worried. Same with laptops, even though I changed cooler for my previous one.

 

16 hours ago, JamesPlayzGamesHD said:

You should replace them every year. It's good to do it around summer time cause that's when it's hot out.

 

Every year maybe. But why does it need to be summertime when its hot?

[mariushm]

It doesn't need to be summertime, it's just that during that period it will be easier to notice the degradation in cooling performance.

 

In the summer, ambient temperatures are in average bigger, which lowers heatsink efficiency in general, which means temperature adjusted fans will have to spin faster to move more air through the heatsink fins to keep the same average temperature, and so on.

 

[LogicalDrm]

On 07/09/2016 at 1:23 PM, mariushm said:

It doesn't need to be summertime, it's just that during that period it will be easier to notice the degradation in cooling performance.

 

In the summer, ambient temperatures are in average bigger, which lowers heatsink efficiency in general, which means temperature adjusted fans will have to spin faster to move more air through the heatsink fins to keep the same average temperature, and so on.

 

What? First sentence was true, rest is really nonsense. Higher ambient temp doesn't effect performance of heatsink. It just makes air going in hotter. Heatsink will perform same no matter what room temp is. Hence that CPU temps will raise as much as room temp has. Not more as you would suggest. Fan curves following CPU temp will need to spin faster. But as said, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with heatsink.

 

I still don't get how summertime would be better to note if temps are worse or not. Wouldn't it be other way around since temps raise anyway along with room temp? Best moment would be when room temp is same with what it was when normal CPU temps were logged.

[mariushm]

Somewhat true. The "degradation in performance" bit I made was a general statement, with natural convection heatsinsk, heatsinks without fans etc.

 

The amount of heat dissipated by the cooler+heatsink combination is directly proportional to the difference between heatsink temperature and ambient temperature and the amount of airflow through the fins of the heatsink.

If the ambient temperature rises, in order to dissipate the same amount of heat in a unit of time, one of the other factors has to change, and that's usually the amount of airflow. This means that in order to keep the processor at the same temperature, the fan speed will be higher.

 

In some computers, people configure the fans in BIOS to "Silent" or similar profiles, where the fans are usually kept on low speeds, unless the temperature of a processor goes above certain thresholds. If the thermal paste becomes so bad that it's no longer effective, then in summer time the effect may be powerful enough to cause the fans to spin up much more often and then  the regular user would eventually notice this behavior.

 

Other users simply have 3 pin fans on their cpu coolers and then some motherboards will still be able to adjust the rotation speed, others will simply run the fan at maximum speed all the time. If it's a low rpm fan, user will notice that the cpu is much hotter in the summer time compared to other seasons.