iMac 27" 2017 Thermal Paste Replacement
Last updated on Jul 16, 2025
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Introduction
Hi everyone, In this video guide, I gonna show you how to disassemble the iMac, clean it from dust and replace thermal paste. Use this guide to prevent your iMac from overheating.
What you need
Parts
Tools
Video Instructions
To reassemble your device, follow these instructions.
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4 Guide Comments
what is the thickness of the gaskets?
Andrey Kushnir - Reply Share
The GPU RAM Thermal Pads are 1.5 thick.
While Apple used a thicker gaping paste (white in color) as it was easier to used on a factory floor. It was not very effective in transferring the heat away. The quality of the thermal pad also plays a role here as well as the GPU's thermal paste. We need to move the heat from the GPU effectively as its heat ramp up can be quite fast, but we don't want to dump the heat sink heat to the RAM so we don't want to effective movement of heat transferring in the wrong direction. This is more so when heavy graphics are being run. It is advised to install a good thermal monitoring App watching once's thermals and ramping up the fans RPM to more aggressively cool the system during heavy work loads.
DanJ - Reply Share
I used the 1.5 mm Thermal pads and found them to be too thick, which caused alignment of the heat sink to be slightly different which caused the alignment of the hidden screw hole to not be in the correct position, which didn't allow me to insert and tighten the screw....I ended up using the old paste, but will need to open it up again to finish the job...
S. Baxter - Reply Share
I always measure the gap as Apple uses a few different venders. I’ve often need to use 1.0 mm. Don’t reuse the old paste stick with the pads.
DanJ - Reply Share