[Jacques]

Would the standard Arctic 0.5mm thermal pad be OK for under heatsink spreaders on say O2 and Octane pimms? I've done some cpu changes recently and had one of the old blue pads crumble away.

[CB_HK]

From what I know, there’s a bit more to thermal pads than paste when it comes to thickness. Too little is bad and too thick can also be problematic. 0.5 is probably going to get you close, though.

FWIW, I’ve removed the pads on some of my processors when doing cleaning and replaced the pads with thermal paste. The swaps have been working just as well if not better.

[Raion]

Yeah contact is important. I don't know if we have a tool that can measure the gaps of things like the O2/Octane PIMMs because paste can't always close the gap properly. You'll fuck an O2 processor hard if you don't replace all the pads properly.

[CB_HK]

... You'll fuck an O2 processor hard if you don't replace all the pads properly.

That’s really good to know. I wasn’t aware that the O2 was that intolerant of being slightly out of spec (as far as thermal pads go).

[Raion]

I lost a 300MHz R12k O2 CPU that way.

[Jacques]

Agreed, I'd rather ensure proper contact than not, once the heatsink is on it's very difficult to tell if there is a gap as the heatsink sits flush with the pcb.