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Warning: The before and after of swapping thermal paste on a 5 year old gaming PC
I pulled a gaming rig from a customer last Tuesday that was constantly hitting 95C on the CPU under load. After a few minutes of work, I cleaned off the old dried up paste and applied a fresh pea-sized drop of Arctic Silver 5. Load temps dropped to 72C, a full 23 degree difference from the original state. The paste had turned into a hard, crusty layer that was basically insulating the chip instead of conducting heat. Has anyone else seen old paste actually crack and separate from the IHS like I did on this one?
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angela_park6h ago
Oh man, that crusty paste situation is always wild to see in person. I actually had a similar thing happen with my own old laptop a couple years back where the paste had basically turned into tiny little brittle shards near the edges of the chip. Like it had just given up completely. It definitely makes you wonder how much heat those things are really dumping into the cooler before you catch it. I just used generic thermal paste from like a local shop and it still dropped temps by like 15 degrees or something close to that.
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