Hardware Switch Lite - Thermal Paste Needs Reapplication?

[NekoMichi]

Yesterday while I opened up my Switch Lite to examine the joystick, I noticed that the thermal paste was in an odd position. Here's what the inside of my Switch Lite looks like:

And here's what one from iFixit looks like:

On other people's units, the paste is very clearly applied directly onto the processor area, however on mine the vast majority of the past has been applied to the end tip of the heat pipe.The smudges you see on top of the processor isn't actually the paste but a thin dust-like residue that does not make contact with the back plate. I haven't scraped off any of the paste or tried to remove any of it, this is what it looks like right after removing the plate for the first time. Looking at the back plate itself, there's no paste on where the processor should be and most of the blob is near the bottom. I also noticed that since day one, the Switch Lite runs perceptibly hotter in a very concentrated spot near the CPU area though the screen than my 2017 Switch (which heats up evenly across the back) when tested against the same games and same in-game scenes.

Is it recommenced that I remove the paste and re-apply it myself? I have some Arctic MX-4 arriving soon, would that do the trick?

 

[cybrian]

If you can safely and confidently take it apart and put it back together there’s no harm in reapplying thermal paste. Aside from that, it’s generally good practice to clean and reapply thermal paste whenever you remove the heat sink anyway, so now I’d say you SHOULD reapply it.

EDIT: I misspoke — I thought that the heat shield you removed was part of the heat sink assembly. That heat shield shouldn’t matter as much if you were to put it back without reapplying paste, but it’d certainly be ideal to do so.

 

[NekoMichi]

Update: So I went ahead and re-applied the thermal paste under the heat pipe (the original grey stuff had turned white and powdery), as well as replaced the clay-like material on top. I also applied thermal pads to the memory after giving everything a good clean.

Then I did the same to my older non-Lite Switch that had CFW tools enabled for temperature monitoring. The status monitor showed that internal temperatures were more or less the same as before which isn't really a surprise, but the external casing now feels much more even in terms of heat spread.