Question about using thermal paste on laptop CPUs

Had a chat with a guy at Micro Center last week who fixes gaming laptops for a living. He told me I've been using way too much thermal paste on every CPU swap I do (like, pea-sized is plenty, not the spread method). I've been doing the credit card spread trick for 3 years on customer machines and probably caused some heat issues without knowing. He said most laptops only need about half a grain of rice worth or they run hotter, not cooler. Makes me wonder how many of my old repairs I should go back and redo. Has anyone else been doing it wrong this whole time and had to change their method?

3 comments

3 Comments

cora_west521d ago

My buddy who builds custom laptops actually tested this with a thermal camera at his shop. He put too much paste on one laptop and the temps jumped 8 degrees compared to the right amount. The excess paste acts like an insulator instead of helping transfer heat. He ended up redoing about 30 laptops he had done before and every single one dropped at least 3-4 degrees after he cleaned off the old paste and used the rice grain method instead.

michael80321d ago

Did your buddy ever try the X pattern? One of my friends runs a small repair shop and he swears by it. He did a test on some old HP laptops where he did a thin X across the CPU instead of a dot and it spread way more even. The paste coverage was almost perfect on the first try. He had one laptop where the temps dropped almost 12 degrees after he switched from his old method.

caseywalker21d ago

That "excess paste acts like an insulator" part is dead on. Had a buddy with an old gaming rig that kept overheating even after he reapplied thermal paste like three times. I told him to stop globbing it on like he was frosting a cake. He finally did a pea sized drop, temps dropped by almost 10 degrees under load. @"cora_west5" your friend's thermal camera test just proves what a lot of us in the shop have seen too. Too much of anything can screw things up.