Should I change thermal putty to thermal pad?

Lasagna

Hello there, I have an Acer Nitro 5 AN-515-43. As you all familiar with the overheating issue in Nitro 5, I looked up the solution and decided to repaste the cpu and gpu with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. I have seen lots of people did it and seen improvements after the repaste. But for me it didnt. Im wondering if I should change the thermal putty(pink paste) that sits between other components and heatsink. And If I should, would thermal putty be better or thermal pad. And what is thickness of thermal pad should I use for Acer Nitro 5?. Thanks

Karlito

@Lasagna Hi there, I would recommend changing the pink putty with thermal pads since you have already repasted your CPU GPU that means air got trapped in the pink putty as your replaced the heatsink. The thermal putty is only on thr 4 vRAM chips hence of your GPU temps are going above 75°C only then should you consider using thermal pads on them.

I repasted my AN515-43 and it did a great job reducing temps by 20°C. My CPU now rarely goes above 80°C. After 6 months of gaming the CPU would touch 100°C and throttle. Kryonaut is supposed to be the best besides liquid metal.
Anyways, I would recommend 2 things here for you -
1) Tighten the screw to the fullest on the heatsink over CPU & GPU. Sometimes if it's not pressing hard enough the contact is not optimal.
2) As @StevenGen suggested, get a laptop cooler. Don't look for a cheap one, this laptop has good vents underneath it should help cool down things a bit more. I'll get one myself soon. Look for the ones that push air to the laptop rather than away from it.

Now your other question. Thermal pad thickness should be 1mm for the vRAMs although I think the ones near the top edge will be better off with 1.5mm. I think the gap is greater with the heatsink surface, but you got to try it to be certain.

philetus

I hope you put the thinnest layer of paste you could and still have good coverage. Too thick is as bad as old paste. Paste is better than pads. Make sure that with the pads off the other components and heatsink are making good contact before you put the paste on.

StevenGen

Lasagna said:

Hello there, I have an Acer Nitro 5 AN-515-43. As you all familiar with the overheating issue in Nitro 5, I looked up the solution and decided to repaste the cpu and gpu with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. I have seen lots of people did it and seen improvements after the repaste. But for me it didnt. Im wondering if I should change the thermal putty(pink paste) that sits between other components and heatsink. And If I should, would thermal putty be better or thermal pad. And what is thickness of thermal pad should I use for Acer Nitro 5?. Thanks

Firstly, repasting is not the be  all and end all for overheating. When you repasted your cpu/gpu of your AN-515-43, did you use the "pea dot" method? As that is how you repaste. Secondly and another way to keep your AN-515-43 cooler is to buy a good "Laptop Tablet Cooler" that will generate more ventilation into the AN-515-43 bottom case ventilation openings to dissipate heat. There are other drastic ways to also mod your laptops ventilation but, this entails modding your bottom case and drilling extra ventilation holes so that the heat can be dissipated more efficiently and from other positions on your bottom case (which I've done to an Aspire V3-571G, that is known for overheating like your AN-515-43) if you want to see and solve overheating, have a look at his guide and what was done to an Aspire V3-571G here "Acer Aspire V3 531G overheating Instructions on how to solve + OC GF 630M": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvCLzUcvUa4



Its up to you as and especially with laptops, there is no magic cure for cpu/gpu overheating problems, especially when you play intense cpu/gpu games for long period of time, its not like with a desktop, where you can adopt extra case fans, water cooling and the many other ways that overclockers fix overheating issues! 

Karlito

@Lasagna Hi there, I would recommend changing the pink putty with thermal pads since you have already repasted your CPU GPU that means air got trapped in the pink putty as your replaced the heatsink. The thermal putty is only on thr 4 vRAM chips hence of your GPU temps are going above 75°C only then should you consider using thermal pads on them.

I repasted my AN515-43 and it did a great job reducing temps by 20°C. My CPU now rarely goes above 80°C. After 6 months of gaming the CPU would touch 100°C and throttle. Kryonaut is supposed to be the best besides liquid metal.
Anyways, I would recommend 2 things here for you -
1) Tighten the screw to the fullest on the heatsink over CPU & GPU. Sometimes if it's not pressing hard enough the contact is not optimal.
2) As @StevenGen suggested, get a laptop cooler. Don't look for a cheap one, this laptop has good vents underneath it should help cool down things a bit more. I'll get one myself soon. Look for the ones that push air to the laptop rather than away from it.

Now your other question. Thermal pad thickness should be 1mm for the vRAMs although I think the ones near the top edge will be better off with 1.5mm. I think the gap is greater with the heatsink surface, but you got to try it to be certain.