CPU thermal paste

[Danniboy]

Hey guys!,

two questions regarding my intel core 2 duo processor (E6600 2.4Ghz)

first off, when i bought it and the rest of my last major upgrade's when installing it, i realized that there was actually no mention of thermal paste in the packaging, nor did it come with any, this had me wondering wether or not to actually apply the thermal paste of my own that i have.
i concluded that perhaps it was not needed as you would expect a retail package of this processor to have paste on the heatsink at the very least! :s any thoughts on this? i have noticed that the temps are worryingly high, altho that may also be down to the airflow within my pc, wich admittedly does need to be re-thought.

an additional question.. not so much related to the above is.. when looking at the required specs of a pc game (Crysis) i noticed that the cpu requirements were 3.2Ghz or there abouts. it had me wondering, what about dual core processors? mine being of the 2.4Ghz variety, and with 2 cores it would add up to 4.8Ghz, but is this really how it works? i assumed that the specs written were applying to a single core processor, but i am unsure of wether the 2 cores actually work together or not to add up to more than the specs required?

i hope that makes sense to people!,
thank u in advance for any thoughts and help u might have.

Danniboy :)

[The New Normal]

Firstly, yes you do need to use thermal paste. I'd guess your c2d came with a circular sticky pad; like double sided tape. This doesn't work as well as a good paste, so if you've got a tube you should use a very very thin layer of this.

With the specs, yeah I think the recommendation for 3.2GHz is for a single core, but it will usually spell out which type it's talking about. You can't just double a dual core's speed though, as most of the time it's not using both cores. It used to be only things like encoding movies, using winzip etc. that fully used both cores (simple repetitive batch tasks). However, newer games are better at using 2 cores than the older games. Crysis is one game that does use both cores.

Some bloke had this to say:

The idea behind using a dual-core being to have one core working on the graphics/physics, while the other core deals with the other in-game processing instructions. Crysis is one example of this, as is Unreal Tournament III. Quad core is still a way's away from being fully utilized (the dual cores still aren't fully optimized yet).

[Danniboy]

hiya, cheers for that, very helpful :)

strangely i never got any kind of paste or double sided tape like thing within the packaging :s im not sure quite why, but in any case, i have my own paste so ill get right on it and use it on the cpu.
im glad to hear about the dual core cpu's being better with newer games, most of my games are fairly new :)

many thanks!

Dannyboy.