Before upgrading your AMD Ryzen CPU you first want to update your motherboards
BIOS. This is especially important if you're wanting to slot in a Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series
CPU into a 300 or 400 series motherboard. If you don't know how to update your motherboard
BIOS I have a video popping up in the cards right now to help you with that.
Once you've got your BIOS updated we can start by unplugging our PC from
power and opening up the side panel of our case.
A quick word of warning, it is possible to damage your CPU by accidentally shocking
it. If your body is all charged up with static electricity and you touch your CPU,
or any other component in your PC for that matter,
there is a chance you could fry that component with an electro-static discharge. A quick and
easy method to mitigate this risk though is to simply touch a metal portion of your
PC's case. This will equalize the static charge between you and your PC and prevent
you from damaging any of your components. I've been using this technique for over 15 years,
have built dozens of PC's using it and to date have killed a grand total of
ZERO PC components.
Ok, now we're ready to remove our CPU cooler. Depending on what CPU cooler
you have this process is going to look very different for you than what I'm showing here,
but basically you'll have some screws or retention bolts of of
some kind you're going to have to remove in order to access your CPU.
Before we go yanking our cooler off though we want to give it a little twist to break the bond with
the thermal paste. I've seen a lot of pictures online of people removing their CPU cooler from
their Ryzen CPU and finding their CPU essentially glued to their cooler. Giving the cooler a little
twist helps to avoid this issue, and once the cooler is freed up we can lift our cooler off
without a problem. Depending on your CPU cooler you may have to unplug your coolers fan cable
from your motherboard at this point to swap your CPU out. As for me I can just move the
pump block of my all in one liquid cooler out of the way here and move on to the next step.
Which is cleaning the thermal paste from both our cooler and our CPU's integrated heat spreader.
I typically use a paper towel and some isopropyl alcohol for this. We can now remove our old CPU
from the socket by first pressing this retention arm slightly to the side to get it past the little
tab holding it down and then lift the arm up until it kinda clicks into place here. We can now grip
the sides of our CPU like so and lift it straight out of the socket. When handling your CPU you want
to make sure you DO NOT touch the gold pins on the bottom of it. They are very delicate and can
be damaged quite easily. If you hold your CPU by the sides like this though, you'll be just fine.
After setting our CPU aside, somewhere safe, we can now take our new CPU out of it's box and slot
it into our motherboard. To help us correctly orient our CPU in the socket there is a little
gold triangle on one corner of the CPU which corresponds with another triangle on the socket
itself. We can now gently place our CPU into the socket like so and before lowering the retention
arm I like to give the CPU a little jiggle just to make sure it's fully seated in the socket. Once
we're sure it's properly seated we can press our retention arm down and lock our new CPU in place.
If your new CPU came with a cooler and you're planning to use it, it will most
likely have thermal paste pre-applied to the cooler so you can skip this next step;
but for those reusing their old cooler we now need to apply some thermal paste to the top
of our CPU's integrated heat spreader. I'm going to be using this Corsair TM30 paste,
link in video description, and what is known as The Line Method for the application.
We're now ready to reinstall our CPU cooler. When screwing your cooler back in place you'll want to
alternate between the different screws, tightening them a little bit at a time until they won't
tighten down anymore. It's important to alternate between screws because if you tighten one all the
way down and then move to another screw you run the risk of damaging your CPU by putting
too much pressure on one side and pinching it as you begin tightening down one of the other sides.
With our cooler now securely in place all we have left to do is plug our fan cable back in,
if we had to unplug it earlier, and before putting your side panel back on
you'll want to plug your PC in and boot it up to make sure everything is working correctly.
And that's pretty much it.