arctic silver

[cured]

what does artic silver thermal compound do?

[.Maleficus.]

It is the thermal paste that goes inbetween your CPU and heatsink. It's a transfer material for heat. It fills in the microscopic imperfections in the CPU surface, giving a better heat transfer to the heatsink.

Thermal paste is necessary on anything that has a heatsink, since it is the initial heat conductor.

[cured]

so would this be used to glue the heatsink to the cpu?

[.Maleficus.]

No. You can't glue a heatsink to a CPU; they weigh far too much to be effective that way. Heatsinks are held on with screws.

They do however make thermal glue stuff for Ramsinks for video cards.

[crenn]

However the AS5 when 'set' can become tough. It's recommended you heat it up if you want to take off the heatsink.

[Scotty]

Thermal paste is there to fill in the microscopic gaps between the CPU IHS and the Heatsink base to maximize thermal conductivity. Too much and it'll overheat, too little and it'll overheat.

[XcOM]

or like me, JUST SLAP IT ON,

i got some liquid stuff you paint on like tipex

[cured]

Okay thanks for clearing that up for me guys!

[Spawn-Inc]

if you are using it on ram sinks (small ones for the ram on video cards and other small heat sources, like inductors, you can mix a bit of super glue or plastic model cement to make it stick. i did it for the inductors on my motherboard as i feel they produce a lot of heat. these are inductors (http://www.isomatic.co.uk/images/smtraf-7.jpg), they help control the voltage for the cpu and are generally located close to the socket. if you look at this (http://www.linuxhardware.org/images/articles/intel775a643800-091704/LGA775-open.jpg) picture there are 3 blue boxes, they are the inductors.

here (http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm) are the instructions for apply it to CPU's for arctic silver 5.