Guru3D Thermal Paste Roundup - Round 2 (2021)

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 05/13/2021 02:56 PM | source: | 90 comment(s)

It has been almost two years since we made part 1 of Thermal Paste Roundup. The community gave us good feedback and appreciated the initial article; thus, we have prepared our second round of that article with close to 30 compounds tested.

Read the review right here.

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TigTex
Junior Member

Posts: 11
Joined: 2009-07-06

#5911991 Posted on: 05/13/2021 04:43 PM

One extremely important factor with thermal compounds is the pump out effect. Laptops with crap cooling that cause high temperature deltas are extremely prone to that and I'm still having issues finding a thermal compound that doesn't escape from under the heatsink after a couple of months (somes are just days!).
For example, I have a Lenovo T490 that only spins the fan after 80ºC (nice design, right? no). The constant heat cicles cause the thermal compound to escape from the CPU die. So I start by having max temperatures of 85ºC and almost no fan spin and 1 week later the temperatures are above 90ºC and the fan spins everytime I do any activity like opening a simple browser tab. When I see the heatsink, the paste has migrated to the corners of the cpu and the die is almost without paste.

MX4 suffers a lot from this. I used it on thousands of laptops when I repair them at my shop and I see that almost all of them fail after short term. Coolermaster mastergel pro v2 provided me the best results but it is still not working with my lenovo laptop. Kryonaut was one of the worse, causing thermal throttling in less than a month.
Probably one of the best "paste" is the carbonaut because it doesn't suffer from the pump out effect.

This issue only affects laptops and gpu's with poor mounting pressure and I've never seen anybody running those tests. Should be easy to replicate (but time consuming): low mounting pressure with high temperature deltas

Silva
Senior Member

Posts: 1747
Joined: 2013-06-04

#5911995 Posted on: 05/13/2021 05:26 PM

@TigTex you bring an interesting topic, I didn't know thermal compounds could "run away" or migrate to the corners worsening performance. Thankfully I've never experienced this.
And ya, laptop designs are generally trash, I don't know if it's incompetence or they just fracking with us.

I've been using a single 4g MX-4 syringe for the past, I don't know, 10 years? Never had a single issue and I recommend it to everyone who asks.
It's a great cost/performance option and I never got the "glued CPU to cooler" situation ever again.

PS: never use pre applied thermal compounds: they suck! (I'd say literally, but they are more like glue)

Glottiz
Senior Member

Posts: 617
Joined: 2006-11-18

#5912006 Posted on: 05/13/2021 06:13 PM

NT-H2 is missing