Thread: No thermal grease necessary? - Yahoo! Answers

Im building my own computer now and a noticed that my motherboard instructions mention thermal grease, however my cpu instructions do not. when i was taking the heatsink off, i noticed that the heatsink already has what appears to be a type of thermal paste. do i need thermal grease anyway?

STOP - look carefully at the grease patch on your new CPU - was it protected by a plastic cover? when you unccover it, is it soft and easily marked with a fingertip? was it a thin, even coating over most of the bottom of the heatsink? If so, that is a NEW swab of thermal grease put there already for you - relax and just fit it. You only need to remove OLD thermal paste that has been cooked, and become hard and dried up, and then only when you...

If its a intel cpu, or an AMD cpu over 1.8ghz, then apply thermal grease anyways. As the cpu will function much better at a lower temperature and it will prevent any disaster that may happen. But if your heatsink already has it on it, then i think you should be fine.