What happens if you use the WRONG amount of thermal paste?

is it better to use too much or too little thermal paste when building your pc and how much hotter would your computer get in these circumstances compared to using an amount somewhere in between these two extremes well today let's find out we'll start by testing a very small amount of thermal paste on our processor a fairly common action if you're a first-time pc builder and maybe a bit hesitant when handling a tube of thermal paste for the sake of these comparisons i'm going to standardize the pattern in which i apply the thermal paste across each variation i'll be deploying the blob or dot pattern right in the middle of our processor which by the way is a third generation i5 this is important because the surface area of this intel processor can be quite different than the processor that you might be using at home for example you can see this amd resin processor is physically larger than this intel processor so if you're following along at home pay attention to the ratio of thermal paste used relative to the chip's overall surface area so with a small dot of thermal paste applied in our system we can measure the temperature of the cpu with this top line graph we'll use a program called prime95 to run a stress test that forces our cpu to run at 100 load and with that we can see the temperature immediately start to climb even after the course of 10 minutes in the short term the cpu with a small dot of thermal paste hits 59 degrees celsius although for context without using any thermal paste at all in the same exact system the cpu would hit well over 100 degrees celsius so even this tiny amount of thermal paste is a drastic improvement over using nothing at all and as we remove the cooler we can see that the thermal paste is confined to the very center of the cpu and unable to spread any further so if we add just a bit more thermal paste here how will it compare well once our system cools off let's conduct our middle option by applying a moderate amount of thermal paste onto our clean cpu this here is closer to the typical amount of thermal paste that you'll see in other pc building guides in pre-built and in stock coolers and with that applied to our system we can run an identical stress test as before under load we can again see the cpu temperature start to rise but you'll notice that the increase is already less dramatic after 10 minutes with the moderate amount of thermal paste our cpu maxes out at 52 degrees celsius which is over 10 cooler than our first benchmark using a small dot of thermal paste which was already a giant improvement over using nothing at all so if we use these three data points as a trend and extrapolate an assumption then the more thermal pace we use the lower our temperature should get right well to put that assumption to the test let's break out the big guns and apply a bunch of thermal paste onto our cpu this is nearly an entire 3.5 gram tube of thermal paste content piled onto a single processor and similar to our previous variations we'll squish it down with our cpu cooler it's a bit hard to see from the video but at this point the thermal paste is seeping over the edges of our integrated heat spreader which you'll see much clearer when we remove the cooler before that though with our mountain of thermal paste applied let's run our cpu stress test one last time under load the processor's temperature expectedly begins to increase but the closer we look at this line graph the more and more familiar it should feel here's a side-by-side comparison of using a giant glob of thermal paste with using a moderate amount of thermal paste and as you can see the temperature graphs are basically mimicking each other even more so at the end of our stress test the max temperature of using this giant glob of thermal paste is actually the exact same temperature of using a moderate amount of thermal paste so in effect that means that at some point using more and more thermal paste does not continue to improve the thermal performance of our system however doing so also doesn't negatively affect it either which is pretty interesting that said using too much thermal paste does have its drawbacks which you can clearly see as we remove our cpu cooler it appears the excess thermal paste did in fact squeeze over the edges of the ihs and beyond having the potential to spill over onto the motherboard and in the worst case underneath the cpu into the socket itself now thankfully thermal paste generally does not conduct electricity and in a previous tick talk of mine i was actually able to successfully run a computer with the thermal paste applied beneath the cpu instead of on top of it so if you do happen to have a bit of excess thermal paste spill over onto your motherboard or even into your socket there's a good chance that it's not the end of the world it'll just be a pain to clean up so in conclusion if you're uncertain about how much thermal pays to use when building your pc this experiment today reveals that you should err on the side of applying too much thermal paste as opposed to applying too little and with that i hope you found this information helpful if you did consider subscribing to my channel for daily tech tinkering and thermal paste experiments as always i'm mr easter your tech tinkerer and i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: mryeester

Views: 2,248,360

Keywords: pc, pc tips, pc building, mryeester, right amount of thermal paste, how much thermal paste to use, thermal paste

Id: 5mhPRpdjf6M

Length: 4min 20sec (260 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022