Please Advise On Thermal Grease Application

Hi everyone,

I've been doing a bit of a system upgrade and have just purchased myself a new motherboard and processor. The processor is an AMD Sempron 3400+ and when I looked at the picture on ebuyer it's a bit different to CPUs I've experienced before. Normally there's a little chip mounted in the centre of some PCB with loads of pins on the opposite side to the chip. When applying the thermal grease I've simply spread it on the chip and base of the heatsink and everything's been fine. In the Sempron pictures however there's no obvious chip, the back of the processor has a nice, even silver surface. Should I smear thermal grease accross the back of the whole thing or just put some in the middle?

I thought I'd ask now as when I open the boxes on Saturday I'll get all excited and won't want to wait around while I figure out where to spreat thermal grease.

Thanx for the help.

 

What Thermal Grease? or Thermal Paste?
What brand specificly?


Arctic Silver Instructions
http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm

I perfer to use Arctic Silver Ceramique
http://www.arcticsilver.com/ceramique_instructions.htm

 

IU will assume you are refering to the "HeatSpreader" on the top of the actual CPU chip. Here is a link on the disassembly of the heatspreader and the exposing of the CPU chip, tons of pics. Importantly some CPU will have the heatspreader covering almost the entire top of the CPU.

http://www.overclockers.com/tips1087/ (DONT TRY THIS AT HOME FOLKS)

ASUS has given an excellent link for ArticSilver and it will basically show that you will only need to apply a small amount of grease into the centre of the Heat Spreader (for modern chips!!!) and not cover the whole thing. Have a look at both links and it should become clear.

 

Thanx to both ASUS and Bold Eagle for the top tips. It was exactly what I needed to know.

Bold Eagle: yeah, it was the integrated heat spreader I was talking about. It's about four years since I last built a system and IHSes didn't seem to be about then, or certainly not on the processors my local electronic store sold anyway. Informative as that article was I think that taking a knife to my swanky new processor is it bit beyond me and I'll keep my IHS in place

ASUS: I've got some Antec Formula 5 compound (http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=77063) from the previous attempt to rebuild my system. (I won't go into details, but let's say that this attempt ended with me having a raging argument with the boys in the electronics shop over the quality of what they sold me.) Looking at the stats I think it's comparable to the Arctic Silver 5 compound and since I'm not going to do anything fancy like overclocking I think I'll stick with it. Any thoughts?

 

Your Antec formula 5 may actually be rebranded AS5, the tech info appears to be identical.

Be careful not to use too much as being silver based it's conductive, thats one reason I prefere to use Ceramique as it's not conductive, Safer