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My brother in law said to skip the thermal paste on my old Athlon, and I listened to him
Back in 2019 I was rebuilding a Socket A Athlon XP machine from a box of parts I got at a flea market in Akron, and my brother in law told me thermal paste was just a gimmick for modern chips. I took his word for it and fired it up, and the thing hit 92C in under two minutes before shutting itself off. I pulled the cooler, cleaned it, and put on a pea sized dot of paste, and it ran at 51C for three months of daily use after that. He still says the paste did nothing and the real fix was me reseating the heatsink. Anyone else run into old timers who swear paste is snake oil?
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thomas_young8d ago
That bit about your brother in law saying the paste was a gimmick really got me, because my uncle pulled the same thing on me with a lawn mower of all things. He swore up and down that oil changes were a scam cooked up by the companies, and that you just top it off forever and it runs fine. So I tried it on a beat up Craftsman I got for forty bucks, ran it two summers, and the thing started knocking so loud the neighbors came over to see what was happening. Turns out the oil was basically tar and the piston was eating itself alive, which is real close to what your Athlon was doing at 92C. Some guys just can't admit the boring maintenance step is the whole reason the machine lives.
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