“Too Much Thermal Paste” – Benchmark of Thermal Paste Quantity
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as data that too much thermal paste is mostly a myth and that too little is the real risk.
What it is
Gamers Nexus benchmarks how the amount and application method of thermal paste affect CPU cooling. It compares pea-sized dots, thin spreads and large blobs with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends simoncion · 2022-12 · on “One Startup’s Cooling Chip May Surge Processor Power”
> ...use as little of it as possible, to avoid adding thickness. You might be interested in watching this: < [this video] > and maybe also this: < [LINK] >. Do note that the videos contain graphs which summarize the findings.
Cites mbell · 2019-04 · on “How to Improve MacBook Pro Performance and Thermals”
This is mostly urban legend. You have to really get ridiculous to apply too much thermal paste but you can use too little, so no reason to err in that direction in mass manufacturing. [this video]
Cites KennyBlanken · 2022-07 · on “Severe thermal throttling discovered in Apple's M2 MacBook Pro”
One person on SomethingAwful re-pasted their MBP (of unknown age), and saw reduced temperatures. They never said it was "overheating", Macs (and all Intel/AMD processors...) have thermal throttling so they can't "overheat", and it's normal for thermal paste to degrade within 2-3 years. It's also normal for laptops to get clogged with dust; I saw a huge reduction in temps on my MBP after I cleaned out the heatsinks, having taken the cover off and found them clogged. The person posted pictures of the original paste job from the factory. The amount of paste is not unreasonable, and what was instead evident was that the paste had dried out, which, again, is normal. That didn't stop people from o
Cites willis936 · 2024-03 · on “Better PC cooling with Python and Grafana”
>You want to use as little paste as possible while fully covering the heat spreader. The data disagrees. Too much paste is fine; too little is not. [this video]