Thermal paste leaking on side?

[airwick97]

I just installed my MSI Core Frozr L CPU cooler to my Ryzen 5 1600 and noticed after I had installed the fan on the cooler that thermal paste had slid off towards one side of the CPU. This happened because I had to adjust the CPU cooler to have equal contact on the entire chip as it was uneven at first. I would say that it is about half way down the metallic side of the CPU. Is this something of immediate concern or will I be okay? I stressed the CPU with CPU Z's stress test for about 30 minutes and the temps never jumped higher than 65 Celsius. I'm concerned because I know that with heat, the compound will become smoother and possibly travel down further, potentially getting on the motherboard.

 

[atomicWAR]

did you use non-conductive paste? If so then there is not a lot to worry about though cleaning up the excess wouldn't be a bad idea. If you used a conductive paste then yes you need to clean it up asap as it can short things out.

 

[airwick97]

did you use non-conductive paste? If so then there is not a lot to worry about though cleaning up the excess wouldn't be a bad idea. If you used a conductive paste then yes you need to clean it up asap as it can short things out.

I'm using the stock thermal paste that came with the cooler. It didn't say if it was conductive or not. Can't find it anywhere with searches either. Maybe I should have used MX-4 :/

MSI uses "Premium thermal compound X" lol whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. No specs on their compound in sight.

 

[atomicWAR]

It is likely non-conductive then. I would still clean it up some and keep an eye on it over the next 200 hours of use or so. Seeing as they use this same paste on their some of their GPUs being non-conductive makes more sense because it would limit the number of RMAs due to paste shorting out GPUs.

 

[airwick97]

It is likely non-conductive then. I would still clean it up some and keep an eye on it over the next 200 hours of use or so. Seeing as they use this same paste on their some of their GPUs being non-conductive makes more sense because it would limit the number of RMAs due to paste shorting out GPUs.

Thanks fren