Reapplying thermal paste

Hello everyone. I have a powercolor r9 290 pcs+ model that I bought an aftermarket cooler assembly for. The raijintek morpheus and I'm also stealing the heatsink backplate/pcie support bracket from an accelero twin turbo kit. Is reapplying the paste the same as a cpu? I plan to use rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs to clean the ridiculous amount of factory applied paste. Maybe a plastic knife to scrape the stuff out of the crevices.

I usually just place a pea sized drop of IC diamond in the center of my cpu and tighten the cooler evenly. Can I do the same for a gpu? Same amount and application? Do I use less/more? Do I have to manually spread it?

I would use the plastic knife to carefully spread it out, I would doubt that just putting the pea-size drop of TIM (and using the tightening force to spread it out) would damage it unless it was a real thick hard to spread TIM, but it's not a chance I would take. I know when I put my water blocks on the stuff that came with the GPU was pretty thick and a pain to get clean, and then it spread in the transistors surrounding the GPU. I am sure someone will clarify in better detail that I can.

t1nm4n said:

I would use the plastic knife to carefully spread it out, I would doubt that just putting the pea-size drop of TIM (and using the tightening force to spread it out) would damage it unless it was a real thick hard to spread TIM, but it's not a chance I would take. I know when I put my water blocks on the stuff that came with the GPU was pretty thick and a pain to get clean, and then it spread in the transistors surrounding the GPU. I am sure someone will clarify in better detail that I can.

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Humm. The possibility of breaking the chip never really crossed my mind. IC diamond is a more thick and hard to spread paste than say Arctic silver. Maybe I'll do just that and spread it like it's jam on toast. Thanks for the input!

Ic diamond is kinda hard to spread when I used it I would make a thin line but be careful scraping out the old stuff and you will be fine.

Scout said:

Ic diamond is kinda hard to spread when I used it I would make a thin line but be careful scraping out the old stuff and you will be fine.

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Yea IC diamond is damn near plastic. I'll make sure to be careful. No rush job here! Thanks.