Shoutout to the cheap thermal paste that almost fried my client's build

I was building a gaming rig for a guy last month and figured I'd save $5 by grabbing a no-name thermal paste off Amazon. It came in a syringe with no brand on it, just a plain white label. Applied it like normal, but after 20 minutes of stress testing the CPU hit 95 degrees and started throttling. I pulled the cooler off and the paste had dried up into this chalky crust already. Spent $15 on a good tube of Arctic MX-6 instead and temps dropped to 68 under load. Anyone else get burned by sketchy thermal paste or am I just too cheap for my own good?

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craig.reese13d ago

lol been there but not with thermal paste. It's like buying the cheapest trash bags and hoping they don't split open on the way to the curb. You always end up paying double when the cheap stuff fails.