AS5 Question

porterjw

porterjw

Spaminator
Staff member
So I finally bought a new case (Cooler Master Elite 330), and figured I'd use this time to get a tube of AS5. I read up on it on AS's website and they said to only put a thin line down the center of the CPU. Now I've always 'painted' the entire CPU cover to have a thin layer. Does it matter either way with AS5?

Grabbed a second 120mm fan too for the front of the new case. I plan on doing some cable management too, so hopefully I'll have some pretty pics to post at some point tomorrow.

--Jay
 
It's debatable, I've tried to find the best method myself, and I found that the line down the middle worked better then spreading it, or "painting" it on.

Cool, lets see some pics! :)
 
Some people use a plastic sandwich bag covering their finger to smear the thin coat of AS-5 or another thermal paste/compound used while some will use a flat rigid object non metalic of course to spread the paste evenly. The thin coat allows for the faster breakin and heat conduction while a heavy coat can act like an insulator. The photo here shows how a glob of paste looks on an AMD cpu with a heat spreader like a 939 or AM2 model.

applyingas5md1.jpg


One article discussed stirring AS-5 as you squeezed it out of the tube to see the circunference of a rasin and then spread evenly in order to mix the silver particles evenly when applying it. With AS-5 you can see the thin dark line in the grey paste as it comes out of the tube.
 
Hmm...one of the basic computer things that has always been ingrained in my memory was to always spread the paste. I'm sure it will be fine with the line down the middle, but I'm not sure if I can get past the mental hang-up!
 
Basically the idea is to spread a very thin even coat of the thermal paste/compound used to more or less fill in the almost microscopic gaps between the cpu and hsf used. The breakin time for AS-5 is about 200hrs. in general. During the first several days for the average user you don't run cpu pounding programs or oc much since that will see the cpu heat up too fast.
 
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