Anyone ever replaced the thermal paste on their laptop?

Anyone ever replaced the thermal paste on their laptop?

I have a ~5 year old MBP and I wonder if that wouldn't be a good idea. That stuff 'wears out' with time, right?

Thats the first thing i do to a laptop when i get one.

What exactly is supposed to 'wear out with time'? In short: Unless it overheats dangerously (inb4 macbook always overheats etc) and you are desperate, you shouldn't do it. It simply doesn't do shit.

>mac
The flames you see bursting out of it is normal, it's just apple's way of reminding you to buy another.

Don't be retarded. The paste turns to shit plastic over time and should be replaced.
Do it, its easy.

How long is thermal paste good for?

Thermal paste cures and shrinks over time, turning into a dry sludge.

Here's some thermodynamics 101 for you all:
Heat transfers faster from one object to another with increased surface area contact.
At a microscopic scale, there are air gaps between two metal objects with no substrate in between.
Air will conduct heat, but it is highly inefficient--air is actually the main insulation component for every home insulation material.

Thermal paste is a substrate designed to conduct heat more efficiently than air. Paste can be composed of many different substances including metal.
Essentially, the job of thermal paste is to push the air out of the joint.

As mentioned before, when thermal paste cures, it shrinks. Regardless of the brand, after 5 years, it shrinks to an almost unacceptable degree--enough to cause overheating.
Therefore, it is recommended to replace thermal paste towards the end of its life cycle.

I don't have enough information about liquid metal thermal paste to draw any conclusions.

Can I just put some thermal paste ontop of the old shit? Don't have the wipes to clean it off.

Yes you can, and I have done this before as a joke.
At the very least, scrape the old shit off with a knife or something.

Do you feel better now that you got that out of your system?

Why is the CPU so fucking annoying to get to in every laptop? Why can't they make it as easy to get to as changing the ram or hdd?

>replaced the thermal paste
>mac
Won't make any difference.

Yeah.
I don't really like people spewing unsubstantiated 2004 toms hardware-tier crap.
If I wanted to hear old wives tales I'd go to the laundromat.

How hard is cleaning off the old paste / apply new for someone who's never done it before?

Maybe around 10-30% of Laptop customers might replace their RAM or Drive.

Less than 1% will ever even think about touching their CPU.

A child could build an entire PC from start to finish.
If you can make a sandwich, you can apply paste.

>Less than 1% will ever even think about touching their CPU.

That's BECAUSE it's such a fucking pain to replace it. Vast majority of the time you have to almost completely disassemble the laptop to get to it.

you can but you shouldn't

For a laptop it's more difficult simply because you might lose screws, electrical tape might wear out, and shitty chink tier manufacturers will mix in a bunch of screws that look the but are actually different.

Some devices (tablets) don't even bother with screws and seal the device by gluing the display in. These you should just throw away. They aren't worth the effort.

I never replaced thermal paste on my laptop from 2010. The GPU was hitting 100 degrees before I replaced it earlier this year.

I have another laptop that was overheating within like 4 years. YMMV.

How much art is there to knowing how much to apply?

There is no art.
All you have to do is apply enough paste such that when the paste on the CPU is spread by the heatsink, it will cover the entire CPU die hidden underneath the IHS (metal covering).

Laptops do not have IHS--the paste goes directly onto the CPU die.

For the average consumer, the CPU die is typically quite small, barely a third of the IHS.
But for server applications, the CPU die can sometimes take up the entire IHS.

Laptops often have thermal pads as well. They're foam impregnated with paste. These are often used as spacers for less critical components.

whoops, they're silicone.

>how long does it last?
>*insert 5 paragraphs about how heat transfer works*
>don’t read any of it
>ctrl F “years”

Enough that you can’t see the metal through the paste. Aka “a layer”. It’s not hard. If you manage to make it too thin then you obviously tried very hard to do that, and if you made it too thick then you’re retarded and should give up now.

Just make sure it covers the whole processor top, but none spills over the edges. I just had a service job on a pooinloo who managed to get thermal paste under the processor and mucked up the pins and pin slots on the main board. Needless to say, his system did not boot and needed replacement hardware.

Is it not dangerous to do this on a laptop given the bare die?

No. The CPU die is surrounded by epoxy. There's nothing you can do to the silicon besides literally break it.

If you're worried about conductivity, desktop CPU dies used to be soldered to the IHS, which is a silicon-metal-metal joint.