> since modern thermal pastes are non-conductive, there is no real downside to an enthusiastic application of paste except for making a mess I recently re-appl

> since modern thermal pastes are non-conductive, there is no real downside to an enthusiastic application of paste except for making a mess I recently re-applied thermal paste (an old Arctic MX-2 I had lying around) on a late 2013 MacBook Pro which has bare-die CPU and GPU. The first time I did it, I applied too much paste and it had an observable negative effect on thermal dissipation. Once I applied the correct amount, I got slightly better results than stock paste.