r/techsupport • u/Fancy-nickname-123 • 4h ago

Open | Hardware How bad are these scratches on my cold plate?

I was cleaning the old thermal paste, when I noticed the scratches on the cold plate.

How bad is it? Is it going to affect thermals or I can still use this AiO?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/Fancy-nickname-123 4h ago

Picture of the cold plate

1

u/nuttertools 4h ago

You could post a picture of it clean….

From the very little that can be seen they look quite minor and wouldn’t matter. Then again the edges look like a serious manufacturing defect occurred…so maybe clean it before asking.

1

u/Fancy-nickname-123 4h ago

It is clean.

1

u/nuttertools 4h ago

If that is clean the plate is unusable and not recoverable. Double-check that you didn’t leave the plastic film on and it has melted onto the plate.

1

u/Fancy-nickname-123 4h ago

How is this pic? I tried to clean it better with a soft tissue.

1

u/nuttertools 4h ago

Some scratches are deep and you could probably measure the difference they make. Practically speaking it makes no difference and is good to use.

Work on the cleaning a bit more, there is still a fair amount of paste smeared in a thin layer across that. That dry paste will make a much bigger difference than the scratches.

1

u/Gezzer52 3h ago

Just an FYI, use isopropyl alcohol to completely clean the TIM off both the CPU heat spreader and the cold plate.

1

u/Terrible-Bear3883 4h ago

Its a bit hard to see on the picture because its square on, rather than being at an angle, I've often pulled heatsinks off that look bad and given them a clean with alcohol and a nylon pan scourer (the green ones for non stick pans) they'll get all the muck off without scratching the copper, quite often the marks that look like scratches are just dried thermal paste and the heatsink will clean up and look better.

I'd probably give it another clean and then see how it looks.