Thermal paste question

[ElementBilly]

I figured its time to replace the thermal paste in my laptop as temps are much hotter than when i got the laptop about 2 years ago. On the gpu there is a thermal pad, can that be removed and replaced with paste?

 

[Yoda4561]

Depends, one of the reasons thermal pads are used is they're more forgiving of gaps between the heatsink and chip. As long as you can get solid contact between the two with paste, it will work as good or better than a pad. If there's a gap when it's fully tightened down, a replacement pad would be a better idea.

 

[glenn37216]

I've replaced several gpu thermal pads on laptops myself and Yoda is dead on right. Sometimes there can be gaps between the gpu and heatsink because gpu mounting screws may not go all the way flush with the pcb board. Just be careful and check that both the gpu and heatsink are completely flush and you should be ok.

 

[ElementBilly]

Thanks for the info guys, looks like you were both right, after looking at it i could see the gpu sat alot lower than the cpu and that was why it had a thermal pad. For now i just replaced the cpu paste till I can get a thermal pad.

 

[limitedaccess]

If you want something a bit more "daring" you can use a copper shim and traditional paste instead. This is what did with my laptop. It should work better. I even rigged a temporary "ghetto" solution with multiple layers of aluminum foil for a bit.

Another option for laptops is you can actually undervolt the CPU via software. This is will actually benefit both CPU and GPU temp, since the heatsink is shared. It also has a benefit to battery life.