Tried a thermal paste trick from a 2015 forum and it dropped my temps 8 degrees.

I used the 'pea' method on an old i7-4790K but got a weird hot spot, so I switched to the 'X' pattern and now I'm wondering if we should stop telling new techs there's only one right way to apply paste.

3 comments

3 Comments

ryan6532mo ago

Didn't a Linus video show the spread method works best, @ericking?

ericking2mo ago

The whole 'stop telling new techs there's only one right way' thing is a mess waiting to happen. You need a simple rule for beginners or they'll put paste on the socket pins. The pea method works fine for almost every modern CPU. Your weird hot spot was probably a mounting pressure issue, not the paste. Giving people options just leads to overthinking and bad results.

viola_cooper6217d ago

Wait, are we really pretending the pea method is some kind of universal fix that never fails? I've been building PCs for like 15 years now, and I'll tell you what - the pea method gave me a weird hot spot on my old Ryzen 3700X that drove me nuts for months. Turns out it was just how the cooler sat, not the paste at all, but I wasted so much time redoing it. I get what you're saying about keeping it simple for beginners though, that's fair. But a little line down the middle worked way better for me on that specific CPU, and I wouldn't have figured that out if someone hadn't mentioned trying something different.