Like it says – Joe
SUMMARY: Anything but the “razor blade” works well.
Applying thermal grease to get a uniform pattern is an important part of getting the most out of CPU cooling. It used to be that the accepted method was to apply a thin coat using a razor blade of the edge of a credit card. Most performance thermal compounds in use today are lightly bulk loaded thin or wet compounds that spread easily, but a compound that has a bulk loading >90% will not spread using the razor blade technique.
Alternatives to the razor blade have included a number of patterns. To ascertain how effective these are, I applied thermal grease (Tuniq TX2) to a pane of glass and then clamped a second pane over it to simulate heatsink clamping to a CPU’s IHS. It was baked for about ten minutes at 150ºC to accelerate spreading. I tried five different spreading schemes:
- Razor blade
- Straight line
- Pea size
- Rice gain size
- “X”
The following pic shows these patterns:
