How much did it cost you ?
Next upgrade is going to be cpu and mobo if required for me so I might as well get an octocore
It cost me £125 about 3 months ago, it was on offer so for that price I was laughing. It's a good CPU for the price, you can't compare it with the current Intels, AMD have fallen behind and the Intel CPUs are clearly superior, but as I said, the bang for the buck is nice and it's gonna be the last upgrade for this system before I go back to an Intel build which is going to cost me an arm and a leg. It does beat quite a lot of the more expensive Intels since they revised it with the Piledriver architecture, the original fx 8350 was lackluster and upset a lot of people.
I am however happy with this CPU's performance in a majority of my gaming experiences, the only downside is, games that don't even try to use multiple cores properly will suffer a lot more on this CPU than an Intel. I pretty much run all these new games on mostly maxed settings with this CPU and a Gainward golden sample GTX 660 with good performance.
I never applied the thermal paste on my cpu, because it said in the instructions that the heat sink/fan has pre-applied thermal interface material.
For example my old cpu is like one piece "glued" with the heat-sink, but i'm not sure how i could separate it without causing any damage, should i use a phon or something like that to heat the paste? i don't need that cpu anymore btw.
Also, should i reapply the thermal paste on my cpu after X years?
The pre-applied thermal paste is usually shit and you can't really be sure what quality of paste they used on it even if you can determine the material. I have always cleaned any of the pre-applied paste off of heatsinks using Nail varnish remover ( acetone based stuff ) and some cotton wool. It cleans the paste off pretty easily and it evaporates within seconds.
I personally use Arctic Silver thermal paste, put a blob of that onto the CPU, which I then smooth out over the CPU with a bank card and place the heatsink down onto. You can seperate the CPU and heatsink just by pulling it off, slowly and firmly. It will of course help if you heat the CPU up before you unplug the PC and take the heatsink off as the paste will be softer. Once separated clean with nail varnish remover or something else acetone based as I mentioned before.
Personally I've never had to reapply my thermal paste, because I've always used a good quality paste and applied it correctly, you might notice temperatures rising after a couple of years and if they're a problem then just reapply. You
always have to reapply paste anytime you take the heatsink off.
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