The $15 thermal paste swap that cured my random shutdowns

Had a rig for 2 years that would just die under load, swapped the stock paste with a cheap tube from Micro Center last week and it's been rock solid since. Anyone else see that big a difference from just a paste replacement?

1 comments

1 Comment

paul_taylor2119h ago

Man that brings back memories. Same thing happened to me with a 2 year old prebuilt, kept crashing in the middle of gaming sessions no matter what I tried. Finally pulled the cooler off and the paste was baked into basically a dry crust, did the swap and it was like a brand new machine. People sleep on how much of a difference fresh paste makes after a couple years, especially if the factory job was thin or cheap to begin with. Glad yours is running solid now, that random shutdown stuff is the worst to troubleshoot. Definitely worth doing if anyone else is pulling their hair out over weird crashes.