Southbridge thermal paste is a specialized lubricant used to enhance heat dissipation in electronic components.
Southbridge thermal paste is a specialized lubricant used to enhance heat dissipation in electronic components.
When a pad is involved, the cooler typically offers significantly more room for the chip, which means you’ll need a substantial amount of thermal paste. Because standard thermal paste has low viscosity, applying it can create a mess rather than achieving good results. I believe it only makes sense to refresh the paste if it was previously used, such as on notebook CPUs or GPUs, or even more extreme cases like between die and heat spreaders on modern i7 CPUs. That material can dry out and severely impact performance compared to high-quality paste. If pads are already in place, the chip usually has a low TDP anyway (e.g., RAM chips, GDDR memory on graphics cards). You can swap them out with fresh thermal pads if you suspect the old ones are dirty or damaged. There are specialized thermal pastes for replacing pads, but I wouldn’t recommend using those.