4 ms·
I laughed so hard at this and then realized this was probably the source of my SLI woes way back in the day. But for real, I recently replaced the thermal past
by o-__-o 7y ago
I laughed so hard at this and then realized this was probably the source of my SLI woes way back in the day.
But for real, I recently replaced the thermal paste on four 10 year old servers and performance improved by 20%!! A full core of performance by ensuring proper heat transfer
- hinkley 7y agoDoes thermal paste age well? I wonder how much if that was bad initial application vs the ravages if time.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoIt probably depends on the type of paste, but I've found completely dried out paste in old systems that would just fall into pieces when you touch it.
- rwmj 7y agoAMD gave us a dual socket test system (back in the Phenom days) which started failing after a couple of years of very heavy use for builds, CI, etc. After much head scratching I eventually found that the thermal paste had dried out, and simply reattaching the CPU fans with new paste fixed the system and it lived for quite a few more years after that.
- mcv 7y agoThat is excellent advice. I've had machines that started out pretty quiet but got noisier as they got older. I figured it was gunk accumulating on the fans or other parts, but I guess checking the paste is a good idea too.
- o-__-o 7y agodepends on the paste, but safe to say 10 years is probably beyond the duty cycle. its $10 for a tube of arctic silver (I went with Arctic's organic, non conductive one I forget the name) that you can use for 10 or more applications. it takes 5 minutes to replace the thermal paste on a cpu. remember intel cpus will simply throttle themselves at high temps, so replacing the paste will allow heat dissipation across all the cores (as I witnessed first hand)