i bought a retail processor and plan to use the heatsink and fan for a while until i can afford a better one. the question i have is that on the bottom of the heatsink where the copper part is there is a gray square of something that resembles clay. i dont know if i should remove it or not?

It's a thermal pad. It would be better to gently scrape it off & put some thermal paste instead.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_s...structions.htm

I do believe certain people use that pad & haven't had problems with it, but it's not always very effective to transfer the heat from the CPU to the heatsink.

get yourself some white spirit - it does the job no problem
using a good thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5) can knock up to as much as 10 degrees over the temperature when using a thermal pad

Steg

Arctic Silver Ceramique has positive reviews on many hardware / tweaker sites as well. Supposedly, ceramique is not capacitive like AS3 (i have never heard of that happening to anyone with AS3) and performs just as good. Check out some reviews on AS Ceramique, AS3, and AS5 to help you decide which paste you want to get.

I've used those stock heatsinks with their thermal pads without any problems in P4 2.2, Celeron 1.8, P3-S 1.4 and Athlon XP 1800+.

If the pads wouldn't work, don't you think they would ship heatsinks with thermal paste instead?

i bought some cooler master premium thermal paste and it seems to do the job well. at idle with the 2500+ clocked to a 3200+ the temp was 47C. i am going to get a better heatsink and fan in the near future when i will keep it oc'ed,i will use arctic silver 5 with that. thanks for the help.

If you have removed the thermal paste attached to the retail heatsink you will almost certainly have violated the warranty with the retail package. If it fails you could be on your own with no comeback on AMD.

Warranty? That was gone as soon as he OCed it.

yeah it would have been gone sooner or later.

sorry to sound like a complete noob (which i kind of am) but i cannot get my stock amd heatsink off! i took the fan off it and now im stuck! i can see these little clips on either side, but i cant get the clip on the heatsink over them! any idea's, and please dont mock me too much...

Well I don't really know how to explain this exactly without actually showing you but here it goes.....

There is a clip on each side correct? Both if you look closely mounted to the mobo or sorta hook onto it if you will. Now one side probably has a big green piece on it with a rectangular hole in it right? You put a flathead screwdriver in there and push down and somewhat out.
NOW BE CAREFUL!!! AS YOU CAN CRACK THE CPU!! Be very careful.

The fan is something completely different on its own it's only attached to the heatsink removing it does nothing. To help you get the heatsink off the cpu. Now when installing you'll notice a a groove( I dunno how else to explain it) that has to match up with the groove(again sorry don't know the word I am looking for here) on the mobo. And you put the heatsink back on vice versa. Put the clips to latch on the back and gently stick in the screwdriver and latch the other side back on to cpu fitting on the mobo. Hope this helps ??

i actually put acrtic silver 5 ON the bottom of the stock heatsink without removing it and on the cpu, did i do something wrong?

yea thanks, i managed to get it off, there was no green part, and to get it off i bend one of the fins on the heatsink but i have bent it back in place. my nexp prob is tring to get the northbrige heatsink off. i have tried turning the little posts on each side to no avail so i am asuming that they sort of pop in and i will have to get round the back of the board to get them out. what a palava. i think i might have damaged the mother board when getting the stock heatsink off because my screw driver slipped and i hit a tiny weinie little bit of metal. one of the small nobally bits tiny buti tloked as though it took some. any body know what they do, or if it could mean big probs. i am so pissed off. just getting ready to install my water cooling as i am running a little hot at the momment and now this....

You should only use one or the other.....and not so much thermal paste that will ooze out. Just a fine skin of it will work.

Okay....why are you trying to remove the Northbridge heatsink?

Yea that was my next question :P

Also you want to be careful when putting on that waterblock on the cpu, I have never installed liquid cooling but I imagine the block goes on the same way as a heatsink? Or something close to it. You can crack your CPU bud so be careful. you can take pliers and squeeze the tip together from the back end of the mother board to remove you heatsinks. But why do you need to remove them?

I didn't even remove the bottom thing from stock heat sink i just added some artic 5 to the cpu core and a little under the HS is that cool or will mine be hotter instead of cooler?

my water cooling kit includes a northbridge cooler. thanks $oulo i guessed as much.