How To Clean And Heat Sink Cpu

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How to quickly and cleanly remove thermal paste

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So you've recently decided to peel back your CPU libation and wait at the thermally-conductive paste, or what's left of it, stuck below. You brave PC builder, you. And now y'all want information technology gone.

Since you might be reading this with a phone in i hand and a messy CPU in the other, I'grand going to cutting to the hunt: The easiest fashion to clean up former thermal paste is a paper towel.

At present some may say that near-infinitesimally pocket-size fibres from the paper towel will stick to the oestrus spreader and prevent adequate cooling, merely so long as you're not rubbing the paper towel to tatters, y'all'll probably be just fine. Nosotros practise it all the time at PC Gamer towers when nosotros're switching chips and have never run into any trouble.

That said, when we really desire to ensure a completely clean contact betoken, for thermal testing, we employ a microfibre cloth to remove all the gunk with the minimal chance of leaving anything else behind. And when we really desire to get the extra mile, nosotros apply a CPU cleaning solution or wipe.

The 1 nosotros use at PC Gamer is chosen ArctiClean, and it comes in two parts. I part clears away the old thermal paste, and the other "purifies" the surface. Essentially yous give the heat spreader a good jump cleaning. A microfibre cloth also works well here.

Better rubber than sad

The key to any CPU cleaning, especially once removed from the motherboard, is to concord merely it by the edges and avoid touching whatever of the contact pads or pins on the underside of the fleck.

It's pretty unlikely you'll do whatever impairment to your flake being even moderately careful well-nigh information technology, particularly when information technology comes to CPUs with pads rather than pins, such every bit Intel'south (and AMD's upcoming Zen 4 fries). But it pays to take things a little slower when you're dealing with expensive and sensitive PC parts.

Jacob earned his start byline writing for his ain tech web log from his hometown in Wales in 2022. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things at PCGamesN, where he would afterwards win command of the kit closet as hardware editor. Nowadays, every bit senior hardware editor at PC Gamer, he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the engineering and gaming manufacture. When he's not writing about GPUs and CPUs, you'll find him trying to get equally far away from the modern earth as possible by wild camping.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-quickly-and-cleanly-remove-thermal-paste/

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