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by jtriangle 842 days ago
You want to use as little paste as possible while fully covering the heat spreader.

Most modern coolers will provide sufficient pressure to spread a pea sized amount of thermal paste to cover the whole cooler.

There are also thermal pads, both reusable and single use, that perfom well and don't require any guesswork.

If you want to paste, noctua has the best paste in terms of thermal resistance, but mx4 or mx5 both perform well, as does cryorig and a bunch of others.
2 comments
willis936 842 days ago
>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.

https://youtu.be/EUWVVTY63hc

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jtriangle 841 days ago
Yes, but that's not what I said. Too much paste makes a mess, too little makes, well, a different mess. A pea sized amount is plenty, being that a pea is fairly large.

Personally, I do an X if I'm not lapping, but that is more complex and a dot works just fine for most things.

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_cenw 841 days ago
pea-sized is against noctua's own recommendation for AM5. they recommend dots in each corner and a bigger one in the center. [1]

also, Kryonaut is one of several high-performance thermal pastes that outperform NT-H1 and even NT-H2, but they require regular (~1 year) re-application. Noctua paste values stability over performance in this regard.

though if you need stability and performance, nothing really beats Honeywell PTM7950, even on a desktop chip.

[1]: https://faqs.noctua.at/en/support/solutions/articles/1010003...

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