Thermal Paste Already On Heat Sink

Thermal paste is applied to the cpu and heat sinks to improve their ability to cool down and conduct heat efficiently.

Thermal paste already on heat sink.

This is the part of the cpu that is still exposed after being installed in a motherboard and is the surface to which you apply thermal paste. A good match between cooler and paste can achieve more than just blindly choosing an expensive thermal compound. If you see areas of gray looking material on a copper plate the thermal paste has already been applied. Because it is a thick liquid it will fill in all the gaps on the component and the bottom of the heatsink.

Some heat sinks will actually come with thermal paste already applied in this case. This serves as a heat sink designed to distribute heat from the processor itself to a cpu cooler as well as provide protection to the processor inside. This provides much better heat transfer to the heat sink. With a pretty sufficient 8 5w mk thermal conductivity rating gc extreme has got all the capacity to handle efficiently and transfer it to the heat sink from your gpu.

It s really easy to spot too. Thermal paste also called thermal compound thermal grease thermal interface material tim thermal gel heat paste heat sink compound heat sink paste or cpu grease is a thermally conductive but usually electrically insulating chemical compound which is commonly used as an interface between heat sinks and heat sources such as high power semiconductor devices. There s no need to add more. Sometimes you actually don t need to apply thermal paste if you bought a cpu heat sink combo.

Laird thermal paste image source. A layer of thermal paste or thermal grease will form a complete coating over the top of the component. If you are looking for a thermal paste specifically for your graphics processor or graphics card you must go for gelid gc extreme thermal paste. Thermal paste is a paste that contains either silicone and zinc oxide the cheaper versions or silver ceramic the more expensive ones.