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Coworker swore by thermal paste spread method, cost me a CPU
A guy in our shop named Dave kept saying you have to spread thermal paste with a credit card for it to work right. I followed his advice on a customer's Ryzen build and got air bubbles bad. CPU ran hot for two weeks before the customer brought it back complaining about shutdowns. Took me $180 in lost profit and a new CPU to learn that a pea-sized dot in the middle is actually the way to go. Has anyone else had a bad tip from a coworker that backfired like this?
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hugoj8610d ago
The credit card method works great on older CPUs that had heat spreaders with exposed dies (like the old Athlon XP chips) but you're right that Ryzen and modern Intel CPUs get messed up by it. The actual trick is a thin line across the middle for Intel's long chips, not a pea dot even, since their IHS is rectangular instead of square. Dave probably learned that trick back in 2008 and never bothered to check if it still applied. Sorry about that $180 lesson though, that one hurts.
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troy_owens10d ago
Read somewhere that the line method for Intel chips actually makes sense because of how the die sits under the heat spreader. Found a deep dive on Overclock.net that showed the hotspots are more along the center line on those newer Intel CPUs while Ryzen benefits from the pea sized dot since the chiplet setup spreads heat more evenly. That credit card trick is basically just asking for bubbles, Dave should have known better with those newer chips.
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