How to Best Apply Thermal Paste

today we're gonna try to once and for all settle the debate on which method of applying heatsink compound works the best stay tuned the method for applying heatsink compound in my personal opinion worries people way too much unfortunately this is a major point of contention for some people it's gotten to the point to where some youtubers don't even show the application of heatsink compound in the video because they just don't want to hear the comments and to be honest with you i don't blame them i've actually edited out of some of my videos just because honestly if i do it different than you that doesn't necessarily mean that my way of doing it is wrong it just means my way of doing it is different as long as the compound covers the heat spreader or at least covers a majority of it then you should be fine but unfortunately you're still going to have people that say the way you do it isn't right so what we're going to do today is we're going to look at several different ways to apply heat sink compound and we're going to see how they spread across the heat spreader on the processor to determine which one is the most efficient however there's a problem with that so typically when you're putting your heatsink on you put your heatsink compound down and then you clip the heatsink down onto the processor and in doing that you spread the compound across the heat spreader unfortunately you can't see what you're doing because the heatsink is blocking it so for that what we're going to do is i'm going to use a piece of glass to perform the same operation we're gonna put the heatsink compound on the heat spreader and then we're gonna push the glass down on top of it to see how it spreads across the heat spreader so without further ado let's get to it okay so the first attempt that we're gonna do here is we're gonna try the good old-fashioned p method this is where you just take compound about the size of a p right in the center of the heat spreader and to do that we're gonna go just like that and now i'm going to take our glass and we're going to push this out and see how it works and there we go we get pretty reasonable coverage across the top of the heat spreader however it is missing the corners all right let's move on to the next one this next method that we're going to try i call the five dot method this essentially you're turning the heat spreader into looking like the number five on a die so we're gonna do that just like this and that's it now let's apply the glass and see how this one spreads this one is a little bit better than the p method it does look like it overlaps just a little bit on the edges right there and it doesn't quite get the corners of the heat spreader however it did do a pretty exceptional job of covering the entire top of the heat spreader so this is another one that i think is a great method now let's move on to the next one the next method we're going to attempt is using a spreader to actually spread the heat sink compound across the top of the heat spreader so let's see how that one goes so the way we do that is we want to put just a little bit of compound on here and then we're going to use the spreader to actually spread this compound across the top of the cpu this one is probably the most difficult one to do and i'm going to go ahead and speed this video up while i do this just so it doesn't take so much time okay there we go so now that we have this spread across we're going to go ahead and apply the glass and see how this one works here we go all right this one here has gotten the best coverage so far obviously because we actually spread the compound across the heat spreader prior to doing this the only downside to this one is is that it takes a long time and honestly it's really messy so i don't necessarily think i'm going to be doing this one on a normal basis however it really does get the job done however what it does seem like is this one here also has a lot of bleed over on the sides as well so just keep that in mind so let's move on to the next one the next method we're going to do requires us to use a stencil to actually do a pattern similar to what you'd get on a factory heat sink and to do that what we're going to do is we're going to pull back of the stencil off right here and the stencil is actually sticky so it sticks right to the processor so we're going to stick this down right here and then we're going to apply the compound to the stencil itself and i haven't done this before so this is going to be the first time i may actually waste a lot of compound unnecessarily on this and then we're going to use our spreader here to simply spread the compound across the stencil and hopefully get a nice even application yeah to be honest with you this really isn't working as good as it um showed on the package nowhere near as good actually it's getting the compound into each hole that's the difficult part all right i think we got it pretty adequately spread there so now what we're going to do is peel the stencil off and it should give us somewhat of a factory looking pattern now we're going to take our glass and we're going to see how this one looks and so far i think this one it might be similar to the p method but um not by much as you can see it came over on the side on two of the sides here it didn't cover the four corners and it just covered the center which would be adequate i mean this would work fine however we wasted an awful lot of heat sink compound to do this if you can see we still have a lot of compound stuck to our stencil here so unfortunately i think this one is a complete waste of time however this kind of gives you an idea of how the compound on a factory heat sink will spread and it doesn't appear as if it touches the entire heat spreader so let's move on to our next one the next method is called the line method essentially what we're going to do is we're just going to draw a line across the cpu die in compound just like that and now we're going to apply the glass and see how this one comes out all right as we can see from this one it came all the way to the edges on the top and bottom of the processor however the sides it didn't cover at all so this one honestly i don't think would work out very well if i were to have used a little bit more compound unfortunately my tube is empty now it may have actually done a little bit better however it would have poured over the top and bottoms even worse so this one isn't one i'm going to use this is isn't one that i would recommend so anyway let's move on to the next one okay so the next method we're going to try is one that's a little bit funner i call this one the happy face method what we're going to do is we're essentially going to draw a happy face on the cpu die and there we go so now let's put the glass on it and see how this one does all right this one actually spread out really well we have some overlap on three sides obviously they're going to be the sides that the mouth was on we didn't get coverage all the way up to the top right here where the eyes were and all four corners looks like they didn't get coverage so this one honestly isn't the best but so far it's the funnest one to do all right i just wanted to do a video here on how to remove this glass this glass is so flat you can't pull it up you actually have to slide it out just like this it actually makes it kind of difficult to get out but there you go makes a real mess too it's hard to clean up so there you have it pretty much every method i just used even the smiley face method covered the heat spreader just fine each one of them probably wouldn't be within margin of error if you did a temperature test on them so in reality all of the different methods work great as long as you cover the areas of the heat spreader that need to be covered you'll be fine and keep in mind also that if you look at the bottom of a heat sink even the heat sink itself is not as big as the heat spreader so even full coverage isn't really as important as you might think you want to cover the center of the heat spreader because that's where all the components are in the processor that actually get hot and that's even the way the heat sinks work so in that case the line method would have worked fine and to be honest with you probably would have been within margin of error of the other ones as well for this test here i used the thermaltake tg50 compound and this compound actually spread really well the reason i used this compound was specifically because i wanted to use this template in this video other than that that was the only reasoning i had for using it and unfortunately i'm completely out now so i won't be able to test it on another system unless i buy another tube however one thing you have to keep in mind when you're doing this is the amount of compound you're using because honestly i believe i paid about 15 bucks for this tube of compound and if you're using this stuff all the time or if you're using it occasionally even this stuff's kind of expensive so considering the fact that each method that i did was just as good as the last method to be honest with you i still recommend the p method just using a p size amount of thermal compound in the middle of the heat spreader works just fine and it uses the least amount of compound from all the different methods that i tried so hopefully this was helpful to you if it was don't forget to like this video and please subscribe to my channel and hit that bell icon so you can be notified of future videos i post a new video every week thanks again

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 33,424

Keywords: thermal paste, thermal compound, thermaltake, TG-50, apply thermal paste

Id: moR-atK2LZk

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020