Do You Even Need Thermal Paste?

[@TechIlliterate]

Thanks for watching! If you need paste and want to support the channel get my favourite Noctua paste here, US: amzn.to/3QJdrDF Canada: amzn.to/3CRGcrY

[@honestboy4]

awesome test, thanks!

[@Kieranh778]

This shows that the cold plate on your AIO has actually pretty good evenness. The temperature without thermal paste is really dependent on the unevenness of the plate, relative to the cpu ihs. If it was more uneven you would see higher temps or even dangerous temps, depending

[@Operational117]

Even then, 9 degrees delta at peak utilization is a sizable difference, proving that thermal paste always helps. But I was shocked that idle was no more than 2 degrees delta and light gaming was only 4 degrees delta. Which proves your point: the more even the IHS' surface and the cooler's contact surface are, the less reliant they are on a thermal interface layer between them. But since you cannot gauge the evenness of your CPU's IHS and your cooler's contact surface without specialized high-precision tools (and exceptional evenness tends to be the exception and not the norm), having thermal paste is still preferable.

[@averyalexander2303]

That's a very good point. I have a Core i7-6850K cooled by an EK Supremacy Evo waterblock and it would instantly hit 100 degrees and thermal throttle under load at stock speed with no thermal paste. But after I lapped the CPU and waterblock totally flat, temps maxed out at around 75 degrees with no thermal paste. Obviously not nearly as good as under 60 degrees with thermal paste, but still totally safe and completely usable once lapped.

[@aurelia8028]

a metal plate has good evenness?? mind=blown

[@Veladus]

"What do you expect to happen?" IDK what I expect to happen, but the first image that popped into my mind was my black mage in Final Fantasy 14 casting Fire IV, the most potent fire spell.

[@thumb-ugly7518]

Yep

[@auntiepha8343]

Yes. I started up a i5 8400 with no thermal paste and a stock cooler I went into bios saw 91 C and shut it down,

[@chungphunglien787]

95c

[@mrjazz2570]

Rookie numbers, mine was 101 C. Get on my level😎

[@vanguard8255]

@@mrjazz2570 mine was 121c get on my level

[@swiadomosczwiazkowpl]

Because stock cooler. This is the cause.

[@Natureboi9729]

Mine shutdown in 10 seconds

[@1three7]

I'm honestly surprised it mattered as much as it did. The paste helps pretty microscopic separations connect. It's cool seeing quantitatively how impactful they are. It's definitely necessary but also not something that has to be applied in a lab setting with any level of small tolerance or specific amounts or patterns.

[@vfn4i83]

I got a theory that people are mounting the coolers way too loose, hence the wide spreed use of huge amounts of thermal paste, I use so very little and spreed it all over the cpu surface without spilling out.

[@fistan5447]

@@vfn4i83 actually you should do it enough to spread through the ihs. This test just means nzxt kraken has spectacularly even mounting surface and pressure. Thermal paste is necessery when these things are not perfect which in almost all cases they're not. You tightened the screw on one side half a turntoo much? half of ihs is wasted. Did your AiO manufacturer cheaped out on manifacturing cold plate, same story excessive heat. As air is actually good insulator which is why paste is necessery, it removes alot of the variables which almost always happen. Hell, just look at latest intel socket, even the motherboard's cpu mounts are so bad that when you switch that to a TR or TG you gain around 5 degrees of cpu temp just from that. And that is WITH thermal paste.

[@mathewsphiri5629]

My cpu is at 60⁰C idle without thermal paste. I think I need it

[@petrolhead0387]

New subscriber here, I really like your approach to these tests and videos. Absolutely no discrimination and 100% honest. About to binge on all of this channel.

[@rickh8380]

I too am a new subscriber. Great content. Out of habit I always lap my coolers with 1500 grit sand paper and Isopropyl Alcohol 91% or better. I use very light pressure and always make sure the sandpaper is wet. When I'm done...the bottom of the cooler feels glass smooth. Not sure if that adds any lower temps, but I do it anyway. Take care all. Cheers

[@anth5189]

If you had a perfectly flat heat spreader and a perfectly flat heat sink mount, you could probably get away with no thermal paste. However that is not the case. Never run a system with no thermal paste.

[@mr2miach]

Yeah, after seeing just how not flat the IHS and heatsink are I would never recommend running a system without the paste. Now, if you have lapped them both and there is perfect 100% contact, maybe. But even then, why not just slap on some paste and enjoy your build.

[@turbofanlover]

This channel should have A LOT more subs. Oh, and thanks for "risking" your CPU for us. I expected a much greater temp difference.

[@kostas201]

OK, my prediction is 10-15 degrees higher temps. I'll continue watching the video now. :)

[@Piemelpikje123]

Wait are you the real kostas!????!1!1?!11

[@DanZhukovin]

Lol my air cooler gets better temps at full load than many liquid coolers, it seems :) Awesome.

[@Wehra96]

@@DanZhukovin it is well known that good air coolers match mid size AIOs, 280s or 360s are needed to get any real gain in actual peak fully soaked temps but liquid coolers obv do better in burst loads because of the large amount of mass to warm up.

[@keithclayton1271]

Your thermal paste comparison videos are great! Thanks for your testing and sharing results.

[@joelatkins5433]

It would have been good if you set the CPU fans to a specific number, that increase of 200rpm slightly altered the results.

[@venimus0]

I think the real difference is the quality of the radiator when dry mount. Else, I also think that applying the paste on it (and spreading) instead of doing that on the CPU, will give slightly better result, as the CPU cap is quite smooth, while the cooler is rough and using too thin layer on the CPU will not fill up all the gaps when pressed

[@BtappinHD]

The CPU cap is quite rough, if was so smooth, it'd be glassy and the copper surface would also be glassy, that would be the only way there'd be little to no gaps. If there's even a smidget of a micron gap then thermal paste would continue to win because it fills in gaps. Simply touching the surface of the cpu would cause gapping problems

[@SeudXe]

Made me feel better about not overthinking how much paste I need exactly on my cpu.

[@budgetcoinhunter]

Agreed. I have to put a new AIO onto my CPU, and I was concerned with the best method for applying my paste. I'm still gonna do small-P/spread though, just for my own peace of mind.

[@bengraham5699]

the surface of the CPU and the Cooler might be without gaps and don't need a filler. Other CPUs and their Coolers might have bigger gaps. Also i wonder if the thermal paste keeps CPU and Cooler a bit separated, so that they don't fuse with each other over time 🤔

[@somethingidk2345]

I am definitely not an expert but I think it mostly depends on what cooler you have, if you have a super cooler than maybe you don’t need thermal paste, but if you have something like a stock cooler than I think adding thermal paste will have a huge benefit

[@Clinthopanonymous]

Searched "no thermal paste" just out of curiosity and came across your awesome channel. I always thought the thermal paste debate was a little silly. Just dab some goop on there and move on with life. Anyways thanks for content!

[@tubro007]

Goop costs money.

[@faeterov..]

Next: what happens if you try to reuse thermal paste: for instance, you put thermal paste, bench your pc and find out that the heat sink isn't making propper contact. So you remove the heatsink, you confirm that it wasn't making proper contact, and then.... everybody says you need to reaply the thermal paste, but maybe just spread it again will do the trick?

[@alcrian8627]

I can confirm to you by experience that it changes nothing. I've reused thermal paste several times and nothing has changed. The only difference I found was when the thermal paste was already solid.

[@spagettifelge7191]

Did that just yesterday. I didn't even bother spreading it again, just took the heatsink completly off and back on again. Changed absolutly nothing.

[@JamesAutoDude]

My guess would be that it depends on how old the thermal paste is, as my laptop suffered doing that but the paste was over 5 years old 🤷‍♂️

[@alexzhu1]

@@spagettifelge7191 damn, wish i knew this earlier

[@serianaa]

It depends on the paste. Some leftover pastes are still reusable, but most hardcore gamers’ thermal pastes’ has some flaky parts, basically some pastes dried out and feels a bit like plasticy instead of a paste.

[@raybois]

Damn!! So this where that little voice comes from all the time... Thanks!

[@TheManAshley]

Thanks for the research. I have a non cpu application that thermal paste may not provide a benefit, but thermal epoxy is still an option. These Thermal Interface Materials, TIM, seem to work less by being a thermal conductor, than by eliminating a non-thermal conductor - air. My research will be to attach a Peltier to heat an aluminum plate in a vacuum chamber. With no air insulation gap between the ceramic face of the Peltier and the aluminum plate, heat conduction should be better than at normal atmosphere. There may still be a need for epoxy, but this demonstration is insightful.

[@agentnightmare6486]

My prediction: I think it really depends on what kind of heatsink you're using, and how good the contact is. A good quality, well fitting heatsink should (in theory, I think) function decent without thermal paste (maybe a few degrees higher in temp), since metal on metal contact should conduct heat relatively well along with the dissipation from the fan. I'd guess that in probably 80% or so scenarios, the engineering of the proc/heatsink together would be decent enough to compensate. I might also be biased because I'm still running a gaming desktop from 2011, and it still runs fairly cool (upper 20s- lower 30s C when not under load) despite me never reapplying thermal paste after building it. But I'm also drunk, so let's see what happens.

[@loopymofo]

my thoughts exactly. Having a perfectly flat contact point from the heat sink limits any real catastrophe, especially when it's copper. Water cooling is also a good reason. Try this with a stock cooler and the results will be very different. I kinda wanna see it happen but for the sake of science I don't want his computer to melt.

[@squidwardo7074]

I bet with a worse cooler (like the stock amd one) it would be a lot worse

[@BootyGoblinesque]

@@squidwardo7074 The stock AMD one (the wraith stealth) is not bad. I haven't examined it thoroughly but I'm sure it's probably machined very well.

[@OinariKanji]

It's interesting, my kraken z63 sprung a leak in the radiator and the effects were immediate, my cpu usage shot to 100% and overheated within a min, it even had thermal paste. I couldn't even boot into windows before it shut down again. Once I put my air cooler back on it was fine. Yet, here you are with no paste and getting stable temps with normal usage. You should have used an air cooler also, cause maybe my failure was due to no liquid being circulated.

[@priceG]

I've been having headaches over my CPU temps recently. I tried everything I could until I decided to try out a different thermal paste brand. Bought a tube of MX-4 and I went from +95ºC under load to 75-ish

[@TechIlliterate]

were you using Colgate before?

[@TheMeanJoeGreen]

id imagine the cooler wasnt tight or uneven

[@captbloodbeard]

@@TechIlliterate damn man, that made me laugh way too hard

[@gothixxx12]

Basic science. Thermal paste creates better conduction between two flat surfaces because under a microscope no surface is actually flat. Hence conductive fluid to fill it. The fact people even have to ask this shows where the works is coming to. It's very easy to use Google.

[@juggernautz]

So long as the fan works, then the paste is a good idea but going raw is not worth it. Then comes the question, the paste or a thermal pad?

[@MrSmitheroons]

I expect higher temps due to air gaps. No plate is perfectly flat. I think I saw no-paste benchmarks before and it's often a "did not finish the test" type of result... Then again I don't remember for sure... (We all saw that the small dot from before was pretty warm...) Edit after watching: Wow. Goes to show beefy water coolers can really do a heck of a job. Even with less than ideal conditions.

[@Kevin-ib4gv]

I'd love to see you do the same testing with a mid-level air cooler. That water cooler is very capable of absorbing so much more heat that yes, no-paste differences are minimal, but due to the nature of water cooling. Could you try it with a $30.00 air cooler? I'll bet there is quite a big difference, but I'll let you try it! I'm on a budget!

[@holotape]

I expect your CPU to overheat and your system to throttle and maybe freeze? Edit: Not even close! Oh well. The b&w part was great

[@bigbotno1]

Would have liked to see this test with a normal stock air cooler.

[@gyorgybereg6916]

Somewhat warmer, but not like a 1000 degrees C. Because the cooler matters, not the paste, the paste helps to even out the two surfaces. Sometimes they touches.

[@jay2valid212]

If this man still likes comments he’s a king

[@TechIlliterate]

No u

[@mralexpawlik]

i have dozens of times had to set up a quick thest bench pc to run some hdd recovery software i would just find a mobo, a cpu and a few sticks of ram a psu and sata cables and just a cpu cooler laying around, i would just throw the cooler on the cpu and not use thermal greese or strap it down i just just place it and launch the program i needed and let it work, works fine you just need a chunk of metal to be honest for a cooler

[@Atheismo9760]

I once didn't change the thermal paste for more that 2 years. I didn't have any thermal paste left. So the temperature difference is much bigger than what you show, I guarantee it. You just had to play for longer.

[@Ant_Dawgg]

im currently doing the same thing lol, ive had my pc for 2 years now and ive never used thermal paste

[@user-mb4xy2cz3t]

No thermal paste is different story than old thermal paste.

[@alwaysemployed656]

I've done it before. The difference is not that gigantic. The misconception many people have about thermal paste is that it is some magical substance that acts like ice cubes in a drink. It's just a really thick grease mixed microscopic powdered metal. The texture is like peanut butter. All it does, if applied correctly, is make sure there's always full contact between the CPU and the heatsink, that's all. The difference between paste and dry is just like the difference between a car's engine oil full and low on oil. The car will run fine with low oil, but it will run better and quieter with full oil.

[@shirakolee]

So the computer i have might not have thermal paste at all lol

[@ARMA__GAMING]

I'm running i5 2400 without thermal for 3 years but now i have an issue my system ran into a problem giving me blue screen and it goes for a restart i thought it might be a virus or something like that so i installed fresh windows 10 but the problem didn't go away it happened again I don't know what to do????

[@alwaysemployed656]

@@ARMA__GAMING One or several of your ram sticks are bad.

[@ARMA__GAMING]

@@alwaysemployed656 ohh no it means my pocket money is in trouble 😨

[@alwaysemployed656]

@@ARMA__GAMING The looping boot means the motherboard and cmos battery are fine. It would not even boot up if something was wrong with either the mainboard or cmos battery. So that narrows it down to the ram. Try making sure the ram sticks are in properly and locked in. If that doesn't work, then time to buy new ram.

[@WSS_the_OG]

Not what I expected! I thought it would run much hotter, and throttle heavily. Thanks for doing this test!

[@dicknr1]

Mine died

[@Cup_70]

All this video proved was that you have very nice and even mounting pressure :)

[@fENzxr]

Itching to try a no thermal paste experiment with my cpu too. Problem is, it's an 12900k.

[@thisnthat3530]

As others have mentioned I think cooler quality matters. I run Pentuim III (both Coppermine and Tualatin variants), Xeon E5450, Xeon E56xx and X56xx series as well as an I7 970 all without paste, and everything works just fine. There are 22 CPUs in total. All the machines are either name brand servers (HP, Compaq, IBM, Dell) with quality parts and good airflow, except the I7 which has a good aftermarket air cooler. After about 8 years in a non-airconditioned room with Australian summer ambient temperature, nothing has shown any sign of heat-related problems.

[@isaacstoltz389]

Just subscribed. This was an extremely well made video, far above some channels with 1M+ subs. You've clearly got the formula down with these videos!

[@user--PM]

that aio is plenty powerful enough to handle a 150w load, that measly 65 watts isn't going to suffer to much with out any thermal compound, so long as you have a solid connection, apply enough pressure and the surfaces mate well, the thermal compound helps transfer the heat in the areas that are not mating that well. so that said, no thermal compound will render higher temps, cause the cpu to loose some performance, but doubt it will damage the newer cpus made in say the last 5 years or so as they will throttle or shut down to save themselves. if all you need to do is post your system, no thermal compound is perfectly fine, just make sure to remove the plastic cover first

[@menknurlan]

I dont get why people expect it to burn up. Like what do you think the cooler is doing? Its made of metals that transport heat VERY well and has full contact on the cpu. Thermal paste may help a little bit to have better connection between the cpu and cooler but the cooler is the thing that does the cooling, not the thermal paste.

[@itbe]

Thank you!! God, I've wanted to see this (and the application video too!) done, to see just how delicate this shit is. EXCELLENT!

[@swiadomosczwiazkowpl]

Did you clean paste from the cooler? My thoughts. 1. Your cooler did great job. Other coolers may not 2. Better thermal pastes like Gelid Extreme or Grizzly Kryonaut could perform much better and differences with them and without them may be higher

[@TechIlliterate]

Yeah, cleaned it. I suspect I could have gotten a few more degrees out of different paste but overall not much more. I would like to try this with a very basic air cooler.

[@BaseNAND]

The thing about thermal paste is, once it's getting too old (especially crappy thermal paste) it's going to have a negative effect because it might crack, leaving areas with zero contact. On my old laptop (about 8 years old) the temps were always quite fine, but one day it suddenly started to get really bad. Turns out the old thermal paste was dry as hell and actually cracked in the middle (leaving an air pocket of a few mm there).

[@HOLLYWOODlosANGELES]

*J'adore ces expériences, je trouve qu'elles font avancer !* Ça rassure de savoir que mettre un peu ou beaucoup de pâte thermique ne change pas grand chose ... Merci pour cette démonstration .

[@TechIlliterate]

Merci à vous!

[@JeffreyWillis800]

so if the difference is so little, then how you apply thermal paste really is about keeping the mess under control, not about how much coverage you get on the CPU.

[@bawxofchawclets4836]

I ran my ryzen 7 3700x for a year and half without have the stock cooler on properly I lifted it up and seen the thermal paste all dried up. Only 1 quarter of the cpu was covered with thermal paste that was usable. Only noticed when I had to upgrade it, funtimes

[@oliverhoschi6135]

Thx for this video. I have tested this years ago, and its no suprise to me. Its almost irrelevant which thermal paste you use. You can buy whatever you want, the only difference is the money you spend.

[@planatgame]

I think it would reach high levels (in celsius) but still have the power with applied thermal paste

[@laron.henderson]

Thanks for this! I'm doing my first build. Just picked up a Ryzen 5 5600X. But I forgot to get the thermal paste. So I just bought some from Amazon.

[@CavalloDiSpade]

my prediction is that it will be significantly hotter, but not like extremely hotter. the actual difference fits what I said, but was a bit less than I thought.

[@XeroCreator]

Interesting results, I honestly thought with an AIO, a good one with cool temps on the cold plate anyway, would perform alright without paste. My takeaway from this though... is that if you have higher temps than with no thermal paste at all... re-applying the paste might not be a bad idea.

[@DIM0RI]

I have a 9 year old Intel Core i7-2600 in my PC and I have been lately getting 92...96 °C temperatures with Intel stock cooler while playing Hunt Showdown. I thought that my CPU had come to the end of its life. Yesterday I figured that maybe I should just in case check the thermal paste situation since the last time I applied it was over three years ago. So I cleaned the old paste away (also cleaned all the dust from the cooler) and applied a new layer and surprisingly it worked! I am now getting 80 °C temperatures. So reapplying thermal paste and cleaning the cooler off of dust really made a difference. So I would say that you should always use thermal paste if you are using the CPU for gaming and other stuff that puts it under stress.

[@TechIlliterate]

For sure. I suspect dry paste is worse then no paste. I would love to test that out.

[@captbloodbeard]

Now do this test with an original Athlon, lol. The system will post, then pretty much freeze a bit after Windows loads. Honestly, this video did surprise me. Gotta hand it to the engineers, modern CPU and motherboard thermal designs have come a long way in the past 20 years.

[@the_hybred648]

NGL I loved that little skit in black in white

[@iwanhaniyoto]

Sometimes I reuse my thermal paste and add just a little if remove the heatsink. Always use "smooth like a butter" to apply the thermal paste.

[@BobG-eh5fc]

Thanks for this video, took a lot of bravery to run without paste!!!

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

Components die quicker the hotter they get! Not directly, but in the long run, a cpu with thermal paste will live longer than a cpu without thermal paste, yes for now it might be just a couple of degrees, but in the long run, not such a good idea! I got a big tube of arctic mx-4 45 grams for about 15€ (20$) and you are right, it lasts a long time!

[@Chad-bc9vi]

Quick and simple answer, yes absolutely

[@TROJANScamBaits]

Not surprised at your findings at all, Not used thermal paste in any of my past PC's for 25+ years, never had any overheating issues either.

[@raylopez99]

You'll never have overheating since all chips since 20 years ago are thermally throttled. The issue is performance: the higher the temperatures, the worse the CPU performance.

[@richupson1319]

How does the cpu temperature monitoring work? Where is the temperature taken from is it averaged over multiple points, does it vary when taken from different points? how often is the temperature sampled and how much smoothing is done before the data is presented in the tool? I guess what I’m really getting at here is could there be micro variations in the temperature that simply don’t show up, if there is, do micro variations have any impact on performance or longevity? Interesting subject. I’m not expecting answers to these questions, there just things that crossed my mind.

[@FrostyBud777]

Thank you so much for your tests and the application dot pattern tests!

[@sjoervanderploeg4340]

With an IHS you might not run into any dangers, but back in an era were direct die cooling was still the norm... this would simply result in your machine locking up under any load.

[@helloken]

Hey I know this is an old video but there is generally no need to worry about the CPU cooler not making good contact with the CPU and it frying anything. Generally all modern processors have sophisticated throttling and other safety measures in place to prevent it just heating up and frying, including the IHS. The core is generally under that metal heat spreader that is installed from the factory on a majority of modern desktop processors that already acts as a small heatsink (also prevents chipping the die from installing and removing the heatsink). In fact, a long time ago Toms Hardware did a test in which they removed the CPU heatsink while a computer was gaming in the early 2000's I believe. They found that the socket AMD Athlon processors of the time (thunderbird cores) just went up in smoke and died (they didn't have an in-die thermal diode so they were not self aware of how hot they were), taking the mobo with them in many cases, but Pentium 3 processors crashed and protected themselves and the mobo, and Pentium 4s gracefully throttled and would even resume working as if nothing had happened once the cooler was placed back on the CPU. The Pentium 4s were also one of the first mainstream desktop processors to get an IHS. You could say the Pentium 4 was the first mainstream processor to get modern CPU overheating protection. I believe AMD also added a thermal diode in their next Athlon XP cores and began implementing their own overheating protection.

[@Zarjio]

I've tried running an old Pentium Dual Core without a cooler attached at all - even with a CPU that's over 10 years old, there was no damage done - the machine wasn't able to fully boot, because it got too hot and the throttling resulted in crashes, but there was no damage. I don't *think* it's possible to overheat a modern CPU - they'll just throttle themselves appropriately to avoid damage. You probably need to go back some 15-20 years to find CPUs that can actually cook themselves.

[@PDog69]

Yeah right

[@DarkSeraph351]

I'd like to see this same test with an air cooler. Liquid is much better at removing heat so I'm curious if the results would be similar with an air cooler.

[@SgtPickledic]

Every CPU is different, the IHS's are not always flat, they can have little imperfections that can cause areas of the IHS to not fully contact in areas on the heatsink which can cause hotspots.. There is already videos showing CPU IHS's being sanded an polished to a prefect flat surface so thermal paste can be tossed.. Thermal paste is used to assist in those areas of surface imperfections.. Keeps production prices down. You can check your own IHS by using a Flat edge like on a caliper, you can slide it across the top of your IHS you will see they are not perfect, the heatsink more so.

[@jd9124]

Nice video. Surprising results. Thanks for exploring this.

[@lurkerrekrul]

How do you get the thermal paste off so easily? A couple months ago, I needed to clean the past off my CPU and heatsink. I had used Arctic SIlver and it was a royal pain in the ass to clean off. I tried dry cloths, clothes soaked in alcohol, cotton swabs, both dry and wet with alcohol. Most of the time, I was just spreading it around, more than removing it. It probably took me 30+ minutes just to get all of it off the CPU. the bottom of the heatsink went a little faster, just because it didn't have any nooks and crannies, like the processor (along the edges).

[@ogsmokey187]

If he would've locked the cpu fan speed to a static rpm, I'm sure it would be a few degrees higher than we just saw. I would estimate around 2-4°c more.

[@ipKonfig]

I went to ITT and we used thermal paste here and there and in my working with hardware through years, you would find it in the oddest places from voltage regulators on old weird places, but it was always said "it just fills the small gaps, it most cases it's not even needed". But you learn that paste gives you the edge to ensure those tiny gaps are filled to ensure contact is made. This video clearly proves that old saying :)

[@AngelTyraelGM]

"Alass for you and for science i turned on the machine" , i know the feeling, you get my sub :}

[@Novaah803]

Great video, I love your testing, I cannot believe this channel is not above 500K subs. Keep up the good work man, these are very high production videos, the quality is amazing, from your lighting, to your photography skills to your audio recording, I appreciate the overall image of this channel you have so much good things going on here, no bullshit sponsors, no paid ads, and even if you did have those I wouldn’t be offended by that. A channel like this does not come around a lot. I loved the video where you tested the paste patterns and this one. I watched them both without looking at your sub count and after finishing this one I was shocked to see that your sub count is so low and your views are too. You just gained a long term subscriber and I will be sharing these videos with all of my associates in the tech field. Thanks for the great content brother! Stay frosty. (One thing I will add is that your thumbnails don’t fit exactly to your video style and your channel. They look well made I just don’t think they flow with the channel. It’s a format I’m not used to seeing as a viewer and maybe it’ll grow on me, I would suggest experimenting with new styles but what do I know, I’m a dying 1K subs old washed up channel lol. Your thumbnails are way better than anything I could create myself.)

[@TechIlliterate]

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I struggle with thumbnails. They are the most dreaded part. I usually put my hands up and say "I guess that?"

[@Novaah803]

@@TechIlliterate haha. Nice tho. You’ll go real far I know.

[@haikiri2011]

I've seen higher differences between thermal pastes out there, which makes me think some pastes are actually insulating the chip.

[@lexluthermiester]

Awesome!! Would not have guessed these results...

[@cagethelonewolf]

My pc went from having no signal to not even turning on when I resetted my cpu. I'd have just bought a mother board speaker so I could listen in and see what the issue is. I think I've broken my cpu due to leaving it on for 5 days whille I was sick with little thermal paste

[@Zfast4y0u]

if you go and lap ur ihs and cooler ( in this case aio ) , the two surfaces would glue to each other, cause they are so flat, ofc you would need some kind mashine to do the lapping for you, to bring it near perfection. then you wouldnt need paste at all

[@josephvahabzadeh1289]

After my brain did a screeching halt asking itself "did I just see someone suggest mayonnaise?" I most certainly wanted to see if you would try PeinTech's suggestion of mayonnaise. Or, would address that comment at all. And, honestly, once we get into condiments, would ketchup or mustard be more effective than mayo? BBQ sauce? Teriyaki? This is the truly deep, existential thought that occurred to me during the Pause The Video moment.

[@TechIlliterate]

Ha! Perhaps I shall. When I have a beater PC to test it on.

[@josephvahabzadeh1289]

@@TechIlliterate I don't know if I should be proud of, or ashamed of, the fact that I am encouraging a CPU Cooling: Condiments Edition. Yet, I'm looking so forward to it! 😆

[@NeptuneAlpheccaChild]

OMG.... squeeky didn't die --- nice mirror finish

[@september9024]

Thermal paste is just to ensure a smooth and complete contact surface with your cooler, because the heat transfer is made by conduction and to do that there needs to be surface to surface contact its not actually designed to keep it cool, although over the years some companies do try to provide products that help improve cooling

[@TheWirkkalaShow]

I always use thermal paste when building of course. But I did get some celerons and pentiums from different generations for testing boards and I don’t put anything at all on top. I used to, but one day I decided to pull the heat sync off with hwmonitor open and it only went up 5c, so now I just save the time and skip it

[@disposable_hero1725]

Can't have an air bubble in thermal paste if there is no thermal paste to begin with.

[@krazed0451]

Thermal paste is more for allowing a more uniform heat transfer, with a no paste setup you risk hot spots on the CPU where there is little contact, whether this would lead to premature failure or not I couldn't say but I wouldn't risk going in dry ;-)

[@ruz54]

i once didint use paste - computer was working till someone started using it then skyrocketed to 100C+ and shut down

[@RarkiGaming]

Thanks for this great video! I like the theme, cutting and presentation very much! Keep going! Thank you ✌️

[@lem0nadina]

I didn't use thermal paste since I got my PC on 2014 and it's still working fine

[@Michael-vm6eo]

I would definitely still use thermal paste. I am new to pc building but I have a pretty good understanding of electricity. So I would think it also protects against corrosion and helps protect from static shock issues.

[@davidcobra1735]

The IHS is solid copper that's milled and then nickel plated so it doesn't rust. You can wash it with regular water. Don't understand what you mean by static shock. The actual chips inside the CPU package are covered with non conductive TIP and then they press fit the IHS on top of everything. The IHS does not touch any electronic component. People love to talk about micro air gaps and all kinds of other dumb shit when they talk about termal paste but the reality is that the paste is mostly there in case the IHS and/or the bottom of the radiator isn't perfectly flat. On many CPUs the IHS is a little bit concave from when it's press fit. Or was that convex?! Anyway it's lower in the middle that's why you put the drop of paste in the middle. Plus that's where the actual chip was for the longest time before these new multi chip CPUs started being a thing. And then there's the fact that big heavy radiators are going to sag when they're sitting horizontally and they're not bolted on hard enough.

[@vladwtv4490]

Thermal paste is an absolute must on older CPUs and long used coolers. For a simple reason. With time the the plate and the surface of the cooler changes shapes (most times its unnoticeable) and the paste "evens" the surfaces.

[@VanillaSnake21]

You can't really say that without any kind of test showing that it's a must. Theoretically that's one of the reasons why thermal paste helps but you actually have to run side by side tests. I actually expect the results to be very similar to this.

[@vladwtv4490]

@@VanillaSnake21 I have tested that. From the long usage, the surface of the CPU and/or the surface of the cooler bends (most times you can see it only with a magnifier). When this happens, if you don't use thermal paste, the contacting surface is far from enough, and the CPU overheats. I had such an issue with an i5 2400, without paste the PC was shutting down while in idle (90 + degrees). When I applied a lot of paste, the CPU was on 70 degrees while gaming. Some time after that, I removed the cooler. Right in the middle there was pretty much no paste (it was shaped like a dot, 2-3mm in diameter) and around it there was a thick layer of paste. To put it simply, from the years, the cap of the CPU got bend outwards a little bit ( I saw it with a magnifier). And without paste, the contact surface was the dot I just mentioned. I have seen this issue on cheap coolers (like those who cost 5$ brand new). The material is crap, and because of that it bends from the heat (in the current case, you could see the bend without any tools). I bought a new cooler, but before that I tried with a lot of paste, wasn't perfect, but it worked.

[@kdzvocalcovers3516]

....my sentiments are the same as that of your poor CPU...from Ryzen to Fryzen?..and one expensive way to extract the gold content...a sigh of relief on my part ,is an understatement..Great vid!

[@MaDrung]

Was the fan speed the same in both of these tests? If it is temperature regulated (which I'm sure it is), you might have it at bad comparison since fan was spinning faster when you tested with no thermal paste.

[@remix1739]

Thermal paste is so essential specially if you have a low end pc like me (4gb ram ) becz it overheats after using some small softwares i played valorant before when i had thermal paste in cpu it just gives no lag and runs smooth 100 fps but now it runns on 60 fps but it gives millions of stutters so ya its very important

[@Deathmasgu]

I am quite surprised. I haven't done any test comparison yet. But I have done a lot of reading in online markets to summarize other players' results of changing from old paste to newly bought paste. Some of them get a decrease in temperature as high as over ten degrees (Cels). But some ppl do find it not so rewarding as temp doesn't change or even gets higher for some unknown reasons. Anyway I decide to renew my paste. My cpu hits 70 degree when it runs at a usage of 15%. It's supposed to be staying at below 45°C when usage is at about 15%.

[@aliff6285]

my pc shut down while playing game and there is not a single dot of thermal paste on my processor

[@skideric]

Actually,about what i expected. Great Video!

[@Praxss]

I was running computer without thermal paste for 1year with intel stock cooler 😂 One day I removed everything for cleaning then I realized that I haven’t put thermal paste on cpu CPU is i5 8400, and it is still running fine (with thermal paste)

[@NeuroPulse]

This explains why old OEM electronics don't just suddenly go into a heat spiral after 10 years.

[@jakke1975]

would've been interesting to see a third test where you apply thermal paste, just not enough to cover the whole cpu. That means the cooler has a smaller contact patch with the cpu itself as well.

[@Xaevryn]

My AIO came with a little sticker thing on the cooling block that acted like a stencil. I spread the thermal paste into all the spots and removed the sticker and it seemed to work fine. my 14900K peaked at around 70C in Cinebench. I don't think that's too terrible considering that this is my first PC build ever. Still waiting on the GPU though. Apparently everyone that has 4080's in stock only say they have them in stock. Have yet to see one actually show up. And I don't want to make the 6 hour round trip drive to one of those only Microcenters in state. Oh, the AIO is a Coolermaster ML360 Atmos.

[@drygordspellweaver8761]

metal is an excellent conductor of heat. What a concept.

[@alexoelkers2292]

I've had my cooler not screwed down all the way and it quickly, almost immediately thermal throttled my processor to keep it at 100c and my PC slowed down to a crawl and acted like a old Vista operating system with a ton of malware running in the background.

[@Michal.Aniol91]

But what happens in notebook where there is limited and small cooling solutions?