Thermal paste question/reco's
 

Once again, a computer question from me.
My computer is cycling the cooling fan more often than it usually does. Working with pictures it'll turn on the fans more than it has in the past.
I had a question a while ago about the computer and someone said to get new paste to put between the heatsink and cpu.
Any recommendations as to which one to buy?
I'm on an old Acer NITRO machine running an 8th gen i7 processor 8700, if that makes any difference.
Thanks.SmileWavy

I doubt there is much difference in brands for a CPU. I just use what came with the CPU fan.

I am not an engineer but I made hundreds of thousands (or more) of heat sinks in a previous career.

Read this: https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-thermal-paste

LOL - this could be a question like "are Monster speaker cables worth $50 a foot" or the great oil debates....

I like Arctic Silver, personally. I've usd multiple products of theirs, their current offering is Arctic Silver 5. Works fine - I even used it on the CHT plate I put between the fins on my 930, as it was to hand...

I'd avoid really cheap "no-name" stuff - I wouldn't trust it to not go solid - but almost any "name brand" thermal grease designed for the purpose should be perfectly fine. In much the same way as any decent motor oil would be fine in a modern car without special requirements. Certainly not worth paying a fortune for some whizz-bang supposed magic ingredient...

$10-15 or so buys you a 3.5 or 5g syringe, that'll treat plenty of chips/CPUs. Don't ignore any other chips that may also have heat sinks, like the North/South bridge or an integrated GPU.

Most manufacturers, for years, have just used a sticky thermal pad between the chip and the heatsink, even on very high end equipment (including rack-mount E-class servers). Saves them a few pennies and some assembly time. It's borderline criminal IMO...

I use thermal compound on any computer or laptop I own or touch. Xeon cores in my desktop ran 10C cooler after - that with the factory heatsink being almost 10" high, with 4 copper tubes filled with Freon, with a high CFM fan pointed right at it...

The sticky pads are simply not a great thermal conductor; and air is an insulator. Instead, a thin even layer of the paste fills the air gaps and provides a better pathway for the heat.

Also clean any dust bunnies out of any cooling fins etc.

Dow 340 is what I spec most of the time for RF heat sinks. You can really go down a rabbit hole and increase the expense looking for the most heat transfer but, I wouldn’t go crazy on a processor heat sink.

Make your own!

<iframe width="727" height="409" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8MOTMq9g8Nk" title="Our Thermal Epoxy vs Store-bought" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This guy has a cool site!

Crazed overclockers stress about thermal paste. You’ve got a much simpler problem. Just get arctic silver.

But consider that fans wear, dust impacts flow, and sometimes the problem is memory controller not cpu.

My laptop was overheating and thermal paste made no difference, I replaced the fan/heat pipe assembly and it’s like new.

Clean everything well, redo cpu thermal paste (don’t use too much!) and hope that fixes the issue.

Before you get too drastic on it, try switching the machine off and putting the vacuum cleaner up against where the fan is and the vents. A layer of dust ïinsulates all the bits and keeps the heat in.

I know you'll ignore this advice, but it's free and as a computer tech I've fixed dozens of computers with this issue.

@Bill Douglas - I've had the box open and used a vacuum and a small paint brush to remove all the dust etc from the fan blades and surrounding areas. I think it's just a case of the paste is cooked.

Thanks all for the advice. It's off to Amazon I go.......................