I had a home built socket 478 board come in once with the complaint that it was a brand new board & CPU but it wouldn't boot.
When I pulled the cooler off the CPU I found they had ~LITERALLY~ used a full heaping tablespoon of thermal paste.
The whole inside of the retention bracket was packed with paste up to the top of the CPU.
Took forever to clean it up. Amazingly it survived.
.

Thermal Caulk. 😀

SquallStrife wrote:

... No thermal paste is as good at transferring heat as "actual" metal-to-metal contact.

Emphasis on "actual". Thermal paste is only there to fill the microscopic air gaps caused by the CPU and HSF's surfaces not being perfectly flat. Where those gaps exist, heat must travel through air ...

And that's where (opens can of worms) lapping comes to the rescue 😎 .

TELVM wrote:

And that's where (opens can of worms) lapping comes to the rescue 😎

I'll just shamelessly quote myself from the thread where lapping came to the rescue last time. 😉

dr_st wrote:

It is funny how the first result when you google "CPU lapping" is this article. The article is great when it comes to detail and clarity of explanation, and in the end presents a meager 2.5C difference in temperatures. 😜 I bet the guy was quite disappointed with the results. Of course he tries to polish it (pun intended) with "it can be the difference between stability and crashes" (it can't, because 2.5C is within the scope of random day-to-day variations).

Overall - if you are a newbie and want to get introduced to the concept of CPU lapping and the complete uselessness of it, all at the same time - that's the article for you. 🤣

In connection to the current topic, I'd say that perhaps with sufficiently well lapped CPU and HS, you can achieve adequate cooling without any TIM in between. This may be interesting from a theoretical point of view, but has little practicality. It's far easier to just use some TIM.

This is why we lap

Industrial Lapping

More Industrial Lapping

G

I don't lap for 3 reasons.
1- I'm too lazy.
2- I like to be able to read the markings and know what it is.
3- I'm too lazy.
.

4 - It was pointless in 2005
5 - It's still pointless now, in 2015

Slap some MX-4 or Ceramique on it and fuggedaboudit...

Yeah I've messed around with lapping. It is way too much effort. I'm sure in industry they do it quite efficiently if they need it.

F

Found this in my travels 🤣 :

Old guy #1: The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver. In my day we had to make thermal paste by grinding it down with […]
Show full quote

Old guy #1: The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver. In my day we had to make thermal paste by grinding it down with stones.

Old guy #2: Silver bricks? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down. Then our dad would assay it, and if it wasn't 99% pure, all we got for breakfast was CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease!

Old guy #3: You had HEAVY ELEMENTS? In my day, the loose clouds of interstellar gas hadn't coalesced into star systems yet. All we had were hydrogen atoms and maybe a trace of helium around Christmas!

Old guy #4: You had loose clouds of interstellar gas. *LUXURY* In my day we had nothing but the vacuum and had to wait for a universe to pop into existence before we could even begin to think about the existence of energy and matter. Kids today ....

TELVM wrote:

Found this in my travels 🤣 :

Old guy #1: The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver. In my day we had to make thermal paste by grinding it down with […]
Show full quote

Old guy #1: The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver. In my day we had to make thermal paste by grinding it down with stones.

Old guy #2: Silver bricks? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down. Then our dad would assay it, and if it wasn't 99% pure, all we got for breakfast was CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease!

Old guy #3: You had HEAVY ELEMENTS? In my day, the loose clouds of interstellar gas hadn't coalesced into star systems yet. All we had were hydrogen atoms and maybe a trace of helium around Christmas!

Old guy #4: You had loose clouds of interstellar gas. *LUXURY* In my day we had nothing but the vacuum and had to wait for a universe to pop into existence before we could even begin to think about the existence of energy and matter. Kids today ....

This is hilarious 🤣!

H

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo