What is thermal paste?
The thermal paste or thermal silicone, is a component that allows a greater heat conduction between 2 surfaces in this case between the processor and the dissipater, it is slimy and most of the times can be white or gray.
Thermal paste composition?
The composition can generally be based on 2 types of ceramics and metals.
The ceramics are a mixture of some viscous liquid and ceramic powder, they are generally white and are quite cheap, but their durability and heat transfer are very low, but they are not electrical conductors.
The metals are very similar to ceramic, they are mixed with viscous liquid but instead of ceramic powder they use some metal, be it aluminum or silver, they are more durable and have a better thermal transfer than ceramic and if they conduct electricity, so you be careful not to overdo the amount applied.
What is the function of thermal paste?
Its function is simple, to help the processor (CPU) does not heat up so much and thus have a better performance and extend the life of it.
Although we think that the surfaces of the materials are perfectly smooth, it is not like that, observing a little closer we can corroborate that no, and that is where the importance of the thermal paste is to be able to help the contact between both materials to improve and in our case that makes the temperatures go down.
Note:
This does not necessarily apply only to the processor (CPU) is also present in graphics cards (GPU) both dedicated and integrated.
One of the main doubts that every person has is when do I have to change the thermal paste to my processor?
It is somewhat difficult to know precisely if we do not disassemble the processor heatsink (CPU), but we can assume that a thermal paste change is needed when:
the temperatures in our processor are very high.
We feel that the pc is very slow and freezes sometimes.
when we open a game or some demanding program and at 5m the pc suddenly turns off.
These are the most common symptoms.
I recommend monitoring the PC, checking the temperatures with respect to the values provided by the manufacturer's page. Or maybe, and if that is very complicated or tedious, you can change the thermal paste every so often, for example. If you put ceramic-based thermal paste, you can change it every 6 months and if it's a metal base, you can change it every 1 year. That depends on the use that the processor has.
The best programs to monitor the PC in my opinion are:
- HWmonitor
- speccy
- aida64
- advanced system care 11
I will leave the link for each program at the end of this publication.
How to place the thermal paste?
There are many ways to place the thermal paste in the processor (CPU) using a small palette, form an X when the thermal paste is applied or make a line, etc. But the best way to apply is to form a drop in the center of the processor (CPU), and this does not allow to create air bubbles that prevent thermal transfer, and as the processor (CPU) is heated from the center to the outside, the transfer It is more efficient.
Here is the link to the programs mentioned above:
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy
https://www.aida64.com/downloads
https://www.iobit.com/es/advancedsystemcarefree.php
Thank you very much, I hope you like this publication, the photos were taken from a cell phone with 265 2MP cameras.