did you put more than this quantity of paste?
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7089/7318734134_97766e53ac_z.jpg

The paste was already applied to the bottom of the heatsink when I installed it.

The method you describe is the worst, causing lots of smal air bubbles between radiator base and CPU heatsink, and thus lowering efficiency drastically.

What steffo wrote is the only good way i know of applicating the paste. Just make sure that this drop is located above the exact location of the chip under the CPU heatsink, use internet to find exact location of it for you CPU model.

Also, I recomend using good thermal grease, I use ZALMAN ZM-STG2.

I can't really make it out of his explanation how it was applied, he just says it was already there. Often I see it already "smeared" out a bit, but as long as it's a continuous smear it should be ok, no? It's the air in between that lowers the efficiency of spreading heat.

For me it was enough to hear that it was already applied. From that I can infer that:

1) It will be some very cheap thermal compound for sure, not 10 dollars per 3.5 gramms grease. :) and

2) We don't know how it was applied, so with some certainty we may assume that it was done wrong, leaving air bubles between compound and heatsink base plate.

it's ok if you don't smear paste or there are some small air bubbles, because cpu heats up when in operation.
Due to this fact, the paste melts and should distribute evenly on the surface, thanks to the pressure applied by heatsink screws/fixation clips/whatever...

problem is people (me as well) have the tendency to put a lot of paste. this can be detrimental because:
- paste serves only to fill surface micropits on heatsink and cpu surfaces, it should not be an intermediate layer (preventing the direct contact between heatsink and cpu) - that's the ideal application
- the more paste you put, the worse is thermal contact (~50um=optimal thickness=minimum thermal resistance, 250um -> 3x thermal resistance from a heatsinks study i saw on a paper, however you have still a lot of margin in most applications)
- if you put too much paste, it can drip from cpu sides and short circuit some contacts on your mobo (that's critical only in case of electrically conductive paste as arctic silver)

i experimented a lot with the classic white paste (insulating silicon type), i dunno how it works with silver compounds, but i guess it's quite similar (except it's a bit harder at room temperature and it's electrically condicutive).

when i tested igbts and mosfets on an aluminium heatsink, i realized that the only difference between a smeared and a non-smeared surface wa a slight opacity (white colour was almost gone, i could clearly see aluminium color).
note: i manually spread the paste.

ah, one last thing: it doesn't taste good =P

This. You just put a small drop in the middle of the cpu, spread it with an old credit card and leave 1cm or so clean on the sides. It's a really thin layer only meant to fill holes and pits and shit and it's gonna get squished like hell by the heatsink once it's set anyway.

i would blow out dust before removing thermal compound and put about 3/4 of the paste he squirts on cpu, but that seems a good job.

I doubt it is just by the temps. What heatsink is it? Did you have to push each corner in like the default Intel heatsinks? My friend had overheating problems because his heatsink could never fully attach.

This one: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-035-AR

It's been almost two years since I bought the parts so I can't really remember. I just remember it being annoying to squeeze in between the motherboard and the RAM

I can't really tell if it's applied properly then. I could only do it when the mainboard was out of the case and all peripherals removed.

Not sure if this is a good indicator, but putting my hand in the case feels completely cool. Even the heatsink is almost unnoticeably slightly warmer.

I guess I should just go buy some thermal paste and try and reseat it anyway? Don't know if or how I've misseated it though.

cpu temp>80 and cold heatsink (<55-60) is not a good sign.

if i were you, i would unmount and reinstall it, so that you can check the state of the thermal contact.
*you will need some isopropyl alchool (don't touch hs/cpu with hands and don't use unpure alcohols) for removing the old paste both from heatsink and cpu surface.
iirc there's a two piece kit by arctic silver (cleaner+thermal paste) for the whole job.

You know your ropes, mate. :)

just designed a heatsink, this one came for free =P

You should definitely re-seat the whole thing, swap the thermal paste, study the instructions carefully so you know everything is correct, and so on.

Does the case have proper airflow? (fresh air in from one end and out the other etc. picture below)

Yeah airflow is fine I'm pretty sure. But yeah, think I'll do just that. Just got to wait for the thermal paste.

If you're impatient about it, use ketchup as thermal paste xD

http://www.hardware.no/artikler/termisk-pasta...et/79544/2

Use Google's translate function in Chrome unless you know this language.

Ketchup even beats Arctic Silver Ceramique. Maybe not in the long run but still, pretty impressive.

come on, thermal compounds don't bake/rot after 1 day :)

Stop tellin bullshit. Ketchup is just a bit of organics with water. When water will dry, organics will turn to dust and the CPU will fry itself in a minute or two.

You really need to lighten up, geesh :P

Sry then. ;)

might as well clean the dust out

Is that heatsink on of those with direct touch heatpipes? if yes, make sure to apply extra termal paste. Put a big drop in the midle of the cpu and then let the pressure of the heat sink squeeze it out.

i almost killed my old 955be because one of those direct touch heatpipe coolers. As i said before those need extra thermal paste to fill the gaps in between the heatpipes. Surface finish is also crapier in this type of cooler.

Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro you're using there?

That cooler was designed/made around the same period as Core 2 Duo's were the latest/ greatest iirc.

I imagine there are superior budget options out there; even if the thermal paste is correctly/efficiently applied, I wouldn't be surprised if the temperatures are always going to be marginal :S

Even an intel stock cooler should be able to keep an i5 2300 below 70 degrees with ease. So must be something wrong with how his cooler is seated, if his temps are going that high (unless he is posting temps in fahrenheit :p ).

I just did an i7, I covered the whole thing in a thin coating of arctic 5, I read so much shit over the years about how to apply, but if you look at the stock paste on the intel fans, you will see its just nerds obsessing. It cannot be worse than stock paste.

As long as you cover it and don't go mad, it should be fine.

If its hot, its either due to the fan not sitting right, or not getting good cooling or low fan speed or its overclocked or something is wrong inside the CPU.

You should be getting late 30's to mid 40's at best with that on idle, assuming all is well.

if its AMD probbly a bit higher.

I would defintely rip it out, use Arctic 5 like me, and see where it gets you, you only need to do it once, so its not worth skimping on.

Try using several monitor programs from the TEMP, I recall one of them was wrong via a certain setting.

I use an old version of CPU-Z with no ads or crap.

Sounds exactly like the problem I had! It was down to the thermal paste. The cpu had been sitting in a cupboard for quite a while and for whatever reason the thermal paste had went bad! I was getting stupidly high temperatures with all the fans running etc... Decided it must be the thermal paste, went and got some new stuff and it fixed the problem right away. I used some kinda double pack, thermal paste + a cleaning solution. Works fine! I used a credit card type plastic thing and spread a thin layer over the cpu.. Haven't had any problems.

i have notebook with i5-480m, its always ~40-50 on idle and ~80-85 om 100%. In 2 years, got 1 autoshutdown (temp was 103). Don't see any problems atout that, it's working great.

if heatsink is still cool while cpu is at 80C, there's a problem with thermal conduction.

its notebook, how can i check cooller temp?
wind coming from hole are hot.

its notebook, how can i check cooller temp?
wind coming from hole are hot.

This is the gayest comment on ESR.

everyone sees what they want to see.

lol

i was talking about aeyuin's situation, however as long as T<85C it's acceptable for a laptop.

i'll risk it and pretend this is a serious question: you can check the temperature of a laptop using the exactly same programs that are used with desktops pcs... laptops are often shit in cooling and tends to overheat

Used the Arctic Silver 5 Paste and Cleaner combo today. Couple things, when I first turned on my computer and used core temp, it was going around the 35-50 section. After about 5 minutes though, it was up to what you see in the below images.

http://i.imgur.com/L2b8sx1.png
http://i.imgur.com/8bIQWmt.png

I cleaned the dust out, cleaned and applied the new thermal paste and made sure I applied my heatsink right.

One thing I notice is the fan is louder now. It may just be in my head, but I remember it being very faint, but it's audible now, even with my headphones on (without sound playing of course).

I also felt around when I was stress testing it and the cpu went to above 90 degrees and the heatsink still seemed way too cool. The motherboard was warmer than it.

Really stuck here :/. Thanks again for the help and advice

Download that.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_speedfan/do...46855c93b/

When you run it FAN 1 should be your CPU fan, you can confirm it by putting your hand on CPU FAN for for a few seconds to slow it down a bit and it should update so you know for sure its not the case fan.

It all depends on the fan, but you should have no problem running it at several thousand RPM.

tehre should be some ghetto ass overlock suite with your MOBO.

which allows you to control things like clock speed, look for fan speed, play around with it and confirm than you can control the speeds and at what RPM you can get.

Mine is on 4000 RPM at the moment, its making my legs cold!
But if you can control the fan speed with the utility that came with your MOBO, start as close as you can to 4000 and work backwards till you find something which is not too noisy and works well for temp.

If you're not getting anywhere with the fan, cutting the blue wire on the FAN (confirm with me you have a blue) that should bypass any speed control and stick the fan on max speed which will shorten the life of the fan but keep the CPU TEMP well in check, if its still hot at 3000+ RPM, its either seated wrong, too much or too little space or the CPU is bad.

90 is really bad. You sould be late 30's in desktop with light tasks.
Maybe 60-65 under load give or take 10 %.

You might have done damage to it already if its been running hot while you were not aware:(

Like I said, whack the CPU fan up to several thousand and work backwards.

if the fan is very noisy, it's either its bearing or it's grating on something (unaxial rotation, deformation , ... - more unlikely since you can verify that by manual inspection).

i would try to put some lube on the fan to revive the bearing (usually you just remove the central sticker and drop some drops of liquid on the shaft tip and let gravity infiltrate into the bearing).
if that doesn't work and the fan is still noisy, just change it? that should be around 10-20euros.

anyway, if the heatsink is still cool with cpu at 90C degrees:
- cpu already baked?
- temperature sensor not working?
- bad thermal contact (screws/fixation system not pushing enough or pushing only in some areas? surfaces not parallel? ...)
- sure it's not due to the fan low rpm

you should also take into account that thermal time constants are long, that is heatsink will warm up several minutes after cpu temperature has increased from 30 to 90 degrees (i wouldn't let it happen, tho).

I meant noisy as in the fan noise it makes from spinning fast.
Not grating or bearings which i doubt is happening due to the age of it.

Haha, I love this thread!

The guy has probably selected a "silent" preset in his BIOS (which is obvious for anyone that isn't a complete retard) which aims for 50°C idle temperature in order to keep fan speed down.

I have like twice as big radiator and also run at 49°C at 5% use (i5-2500 here). It's how things are supposed to work. Oh yeah, and the fan runs at <800 RPM all the time, I sleep next to it, FFS!

Oh and also, Intel starts throttling at like 110°C, no problem at all with getting to 85 under load in the silent preset.


And then you get people talking about air bubbles in silicon paste, priceless! :DDD

why don't you turn it off or put it to sleep?

Network connections break. QL session expires. It's awful.

Oh and also, Intel starts throttling at like 110°C, no problem at all with getting to 85 under load in the silent preset.

you can reach steady 98C from spec, however intel uses the [40;70]C CPU temp range (seen in a note here) for tests.
imo 85C is too hot, but it's personal choice to go faster / last longer.
OC (and temp) impact on CPU life

PS The guy has not.

http://i.imgur.com/zBY9pLb.jpg

That's the info from my BIOS. No silent preset, fans at 100%

I was worried I might've put to much paste on but that wouldn't explain why it was so high before anyway. I took a picture before anyway: http://i.imgur.com/XphsHeB.jpg

I guess 2400rpm is max my fan goes but even then, that should be enough to give me cooler temps when it's near idle right?

I had a look at your pictures. It looks like you put too little paste on it. I put it on and made sure I had enough to spread over the whole chip.

However, it probably isn't the paste, more likely the heatsink isn't seated properly. One of my old CPU's always ran very hot. I didn't really care because it was a shitty pc and it still worked, but one day I decided to sort it out, and basically one of the mobo clips wasn't tight (I hate intel stock fans) and once it was in tight temps dropped 30 degrees across the board.

if you put more, you may want to remove the excess of paste afterwards.

That is not enough paste. You need about 2.5 times as much cos when the fan presses on top of it in that formation, I don't think it would distrubute it right so I think you have parts lacking any paste, so do it manually with your little finger and make sure the whole thing is covered.

2500 RPM is quite fast, so no something is defo wrong with those temps.

If you redistribute the paste as I said.
Confirm the cooller is sitting right. look at it at eye level and twist and pull on it gently.
Are sure the fan is spinning that fast.

Its a damaged CPU or you are somehow getting a false reading on the temp.

They are quite strong, so I think its more likely a section of the CPU is not covered.

i guess it's enough, that paste really melts when it gets hot.

I just got a new cooler (Hyper 212 EVO), and I thought that I had applied too much paste, but it appears to be fine. Your temps are way way too high, so something is definitely wrong.

I have a similar processor to you, the i5 2500 non k, overclocked to 104 BCLK and max multipliers for non k (turbo multipliers increased by 4).

My CPU idles at around 30 degrees (seen it go down to 24 degrees on a single core) and the max I've seen it under load is around 60 degrees. And I lowered the fan speed to "silent".

imgur.com/a/TRgAm

OK, just opened up my case and took a bunch of pictures. Should be able to tell if I've started out right from this. The thermal paste looks like it spread out enough too. And I can't see it being the reason I get above 90 degrees on 100% on an unoverclocked cpu

Umm I think it's fixed now... Only thing I changed was I didn't screw UB the heatsink as tightly. Goes to just under 60 on 100% load. 25-40 on low load. Is that good for standard clock? Reason I wanted to Gerry my temps down was so I could over clock it even slightly. Might try reapplying the paste again and maybe loosening it more.