Thermal paste or pad for AMD Athlon 64 CPU

I'm assuming that the sticky square on the bottom of my heatsink for my new retail AMD Atlon 64 3000 CPU is a thermal pad. The bottom of the heatsink came packaged/sealed over the bottom surface and the sticky square.

Should I use the pad? Is it indeed a thermal pad? Or should I use some thermal paste instead. If I use the paste do I need to clean off the bottom of the sticky square that is on the heatsink bottom? Or just apply the thermal paste with cleaning the bottom of the heatsink.

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm running into some new situations and I'm right in the middle of a new build. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Randy

 

Hey there. It IS a thermal pad... but if you care about your computer you will clean off that horrible goo and apply some REAL thermal paste any type will do really but Arctic Silver 5 is the recommended choice by most.

The arctic Silve 5 paste lowered my idle temps a good 40-50% .....but I have a Pentium 4 Prescott.

Good luck with the computer building!!

 

Its just more money,more work and more time unless your overclocking use the pad AMD says its good enough and they want your cpu to stay alive more than you.

 

Arctic silver works. It brought my cpu down 4 to 5 degrees from the standard pad. So yeah.. a bit more money and you can cool your CPU a bit more and keep it cooler under load.

 

I second that. A friend of mine was having some stability problems with his computer, we reconed it because the system was overheating. We added a fan, it helped a little (the computer stayed on for more than 5 minutes without bluescreening), but after swapping the pad for AS 5 even after 6 hours stress testing, no bluescreen

 

New Problem with heat sink

Hey everybody thanks for your input, I think I messed up though. I did get AS 5 and then I did clean the thermal pad off the bottom of the heat sink, but then when I went to "practice" snapping it into place (before applying thermal paste), I snapped it in place a little too well, and now I'm finding it difficult to remove.

The metal tabs that go over the plastic clips don't seem to want to budge and I don't want to apply too much pressure with a flathead screwdriver to spread the metal tabs lest I bounce off and inflict damage to the motherboard.

Are they really that hard to remove? Thanks, Randy

 

Re: New Problem with heat sink

They can be a real pain in the butt for sure.

 

If you have a look on the amd website they have a load of tutorial videos showing you exactly how to do what your doing they might give you an idea of how much pressure to apply and the technique.

 

Found it! There is a guarded bracket on the non-black clip side that you insert a fairly wide flat head screwdriver in, and then you can spread that side's clip and remove it, then just tilt toward other side to remove other clip.

Thanks everyone for your help, Randy