Thermal paste question

[Ahmet Alhurmuzy]

Hello everyone

 

I bought a ryzen 2600X cpu and b450 gaming plus board ,, I installed the cpu cooler that's come with thermal paste applied on it , after that the back plate of motherboard dont tight the screw well, so I removed the cooler and thermal paste applied on cpu and i leave it like this about 10 Hours ,, soooooo should i buy a thermal paste to applied again on cpu or the paste that applied on cpu its will go good after I leave it 10 Hours on the table.

 

 

Need help please

Thanks for all response.

[lmeneses]

i would get new thermal paste

[jiyeon]

Get some new thermal paste such as Arctic MX-4, you can get it on the cheap and it does great at what it's meant to do for the price.

 

You can redo your cooler without redoing the paste but I would never recommend it especially with the gap created once the cooler is removed.

[mariushm]

The thermal paste would not function as well as a brand new paste.

It will still work and help with cooling (definitely better than no paste at all) but you should really buy a quality thermal paste (doesn't have to be expensive, just not the cheapest ones, for example arctic cooling mx-2 or arctic silver ceramique are cheap and more than decent), clean the old thermal paste and apply new paste (a pea size blob of paste in the center of the cpu die is enough)

 

A bit more technical : it's not just the fact that you left the heatsink with the paste in open air, it's also the simple fact that you removed the heatsink.

The thermal paste is supposed to be a thin layer of material that fills the empty space between heatsink and the cpu, all those microscopic holes in the material, and all the space caused by the fact that surfaces are not perfectly flat.

When you press down the heatsink for the first time on the cpu, the paste gets squeezed (or flattened) and it spreads out across the whole two surfaces (heatsink AND cpu) and goes inside those microscopic holes and in the engravings and makes things flat and also pushes out AIR or other things that sit there normally.  AIR is worse at transferring heat between the two metal bits, thermal paste in a thin layer transfers heat much better. 

Once the heatsink is removed there's a tiny problem...  when you put the heatsink back , there's paste on both surfaces and when these surfaces make contact again, tiny blobs of air, basically air particles, can get trapped in depressions in the thermal paste that's on the two surfaces, so now you'll have very small areas (think the diameter of a needle tip) between the heatsink and the cpu where there's slower heat transfer, so that's how the performance of the thermal paste drops.

There's still transfer across the whole area, just not as perfect as if you'd apply new thermal paste.

[Ahmet Alhurmuzy]

33 minutes ago, seoz said:

Get some new thermal paste such as Arctic MX-4, you can get it on the cheap and it does great at what it's meant to do for the price.

 

You can redo your cooler without redoing the paste but I would never recommend it especially with the gap created once the cooler is removed.

Thanks bro

[Ahmet Alhurmuzy]

28 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The thermal paste would not function as well as a brand new paste.

It will still work and help with cooling (definitely better than no paste at all) but you should really buy a quality thermal paste (doesn't have to be expensive, just not the cheapest ones, for example arctic cooling mx-2 or arctic silver ceramique are cheap and more than decent), clean the old thermal paste and apply new paste (a pea size blob of paste in the center of the cpu die is enough)

 

A bit more technical : it's not just the fact that you left the heatsink with the paste in open air, it's also the simple fact that you removed the heatsink.

The thermal paste is supposed to be a thin layer of material that fills the empty space between heatsink and the cpu, all those microscopic holes in the material, and all the space caused by the fact that surfaces are not perfectly flat.

When you press down the heatsink for the first time on the cpu, the paste gets squeezed (or flattened) and it spreads out across the whole two surfaces (heatsink AND cpu) and goes inside those microscopic holes and in the engravings and makes things flat and also pushes out AIR or other things that sit there normally.  AIR is worse at transferring heat between the two metal bits, thermal paste in a thin layer transfers heat much better. 

Once the heatsink is removed there's a tiny problem...  when you put the heatsink back , there's paste on both surfaces and when these surfaces make contact again, tiny blobs of air, basically air particles, can get trapped in depressions in the thermal paste that's on the two surfaces, so now you'll have very small areas (think the diameter of a needle tip) between the heatsink and the cpu where there's slower heat transfer, so that's how the performance of the thermal paste drops.

There's still transfer across the whole area, just not as perfect as if you'd apply new thermal paste.

Many thanks,, i appreciate your help