Thermal paste

[warpus]

I have been working on fixing up an older PC that's been sitting in my closet.. which involved a 3 hour long dust cleaning and parts removal marathon, so far.

I've removed all the parts and cleaned the case.

Now.. I've had to take the heatsink off and clean that off.. and that's when I realized that I was going to have to re-apply thermal paste on the CPU before I reseat the heatsink.

So.. What exactly should I do? I clean off the old thermal paste first, right? How do I do this without damaging the CPU?

 

[vbraun]

I use an alcohol pad, which does the job nicely.

 

[StarWorms]

Meh, I just did it with a piece of kitchen roll.

 

[GVBN]

ArctiClean. I guess alcohol or turpentine works too

 

[warpus]

So Polish vodka would do the job then?

Do I need to take the CPU out of its socket when doing this?

 

[Rheinmetall]

Vodka is better used for drinking. If you can clean the CPU without dismounting it, feel free to do so.

 

[kuukkeli]

So Polish vodka would do the job then?

Unless you apply too much of it down your throat before I'm also guessing there are some cheaper alcohol based solvents available.

 

[GoodGame]

I would think rubbing alcohol and a linen free cloth (e.g. eyeglass cleaning kit) is fine. ArticSilver sells a decent two part kit of paste remover and pre-paste preparing solvent, if you want to spend the money on it.