Help with heatsink

#1

Hello, and pardon the question, as I have never experimented with hardware in the past. Bought the rock pi 4b and the large heatsink.
I understand that the thermal paste must be applied between the CPU and the heatsink. Does it make a difference if you apply it on the CPU or the heatsink?
Does it need to be evenly applied across the CPU surface? Do you apply the entire paste package provided or a few “drops”?
Again pardon my ignorance

#2

Only apply a few drops in the middle part of the CPU and spread it a little.

#3

Thank you! Spread it with a screw driver and the likes?

#4

You can just use a piece of toilet paper or a tissue to gently spread it evenly.

In Android - Advanced Settings
You can enable the setting to see the CPU temperature.
It should be between 30-40 degrees Celsius then it works properly.

If you use my LibreELEC image with 1080p Netflix software decoding, the temperature might go up to 55 degrees because the CPU has to work a lot harder since Linux can’t hardware decode DRM protected videos. In LibreELEC System Info, it also shows the CPU temperature.

#5

One thing to note: the newer version of heatsink have all 4 corners cut off from the raised area around the cpu. This is to avoid interference with other components.

If that is not the case with your heatsink, recommend you to take it out and file the raised cpu corners before reapplying.

1 Like