Spent $350 on a better thermal paste and my temps dropped 10 degrees

I finally swapped out the generic paste on my gaming rig for some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut last week. That stuff costs like $15 a gram but my CPU went from hitting 85C under load to staying at 75C. Anyone else notice a big difference with higher end pastes or am I just lucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

keith9007d ago

I get that you're excited about the drop, but thermal paste is usually just thermal paste. I ran Arctic Silver 5 for years on a Ryzen 7 and got within 2 or 3 degrees of what my buddy saw with Kryonaut in the same case and cooler. Your 10 degree improvement might be from a bad first application, maybe the paste was dried out or you didn't spread it evenly before. Cheaper pastes like Noctua's NT-H1 or even the stock stuff on most coolers are already good enough for a 5 degree difference at most, not 10. Did you check if your cooler was mounted right the first time, or if the pressure changed when you swapped the paste?

lilyp377d agoMost Upvoted

Hah, yeah you're probably right, I’m definitely the kind of person who'd screw up a paste job and blame the paste instead of my shaky hands. First time I tried it I got more on my thumb than on the CPU.

elliot_gibson276d ago

Hard disagree on this one. A bad first application wouldn't magically give you a stable 10 degree drop after swapping. That's a huge jump and it's not just from fixing a mistake. Thermal pastes have different thermal conductivity ratings and that's a real difference, not just marketing fluff. If you're pushing a high wattage CPU close to its limits, the better paste actually moves the heat faster to the cooler. Cheap paste works fine for most builds but once you're dealing with serious heat output, the premium stuff earns its keep. Your buddy's test probably had different airflow or case temps too, which throws the comparison off. 10 degrees is a solid gain and I'd take that any day.