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I thought thermal paste brand was pure snake oil, then a 6 degree drop on my test bench proved me wrong
For a long time I figured all thermal paste was the same goop and the fancy stuff was just marketing for guys who like shiny boxes. Last Tuesday I finally ran a proper test at my bench in Reno, same i7 chip, same cooler, same room temp, and I swapped out the old gray stuff for a $9 tube of higher grade paste. Idle temps barely moved but under a 30 minute load test the CPU dropped from 82C to 76C, and that's a 6 degree gap I can't ignore. The difference was the application too, I used a thin spread instead of my usual blob and that probably helped as much as the paste did. Now I'm wondering how much of my past "paste doesn't matter" attitude was just me being lazy about redoing old client machines. Has anyone else actually seen a real drop like that, or did I just get lucky with one chip?
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sage_rodriguez4d ago
82C to 76C could honestly just be from the reseat. Once you pull a cooler off and put it back on, the old paste gets cleaned out and you get fresh contact, so the mount alone can buy you a few degrees. The thin spread vs blob thing probably did more than the paste brand did. A 9 dollar tube beating the old gray stuff by 6 degrees with no other changes would surprise me.
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