Do You Even Need Thermal Paste? 

Thanks for watching! If you need paste and want to support the channel get my favourite Noctua paste here, US: amzn.to/3QJdrDF Canada: amzn.to/3CRGcrY

"What do you expect to happen?" IDK what I expect to happen, but the first image that popped into my mind was my black mage in Final Fantasy 14 casting Fire IV, the most potent fire spell.

This shows that the cold plate on your AIO has actually pretty good evenness. The temperature without thermal paste is really dependent on the unevenness of the plate, relative to the cpu ihs. If it was more uneven you would see higher temps or even dangerous temps, depending

Your thermal paste comparison videos are great! Thanks for your testing and sharing results.

New subscriber here, I really like your approach to these tests and videos. Absolutely no discrimination and 100% honest. About to binge on all of this channel.

Yes. I started up a i5 8400 with no thermal paste and a stock cooler I went into bios saw 91 C and shut it down,

I'm honestly surprised it mattered as much as it did. The paste helps pretty microscopic separations connect. It's cool seeing quantitatively how impactful they are. It's definitely necessary but also not something that has to be applied in a lab setting with any level of small tolerance or specific amounts or patterns.

This channel should have A LOT more subs. Oh, and thanks for "risking" your CPU for us. I expected a much greater temp difference.

OK, my prediction is 10-15 degrees higher temps. I'll continue watching the video now. :)

Just subscribed. This was an extremely well made video, far above some channels with 1M+ subs. You've clearly got the formula down with these videos!

Thank you so much for your tests and the application dot pattern tests!

Great video, I love your testing, I cannot believe this channel is not above 500K subs. Keep up the good work man, these are very high production videos, the quality is amazing, from your lighting, to your photography skills to your audio recording, I appreciate the overall image of this channel you have so much good things going on here, no bullshit sponsors, no paid ads, and even if you did have those I wouldn’t be offended by that. A channel like this does not come around a lot. I loved the video where you tested the paste patterns and this one. I watched them both without looking at your sub count and after finishing this one I was shocked to see that your sub count is so low and your views are too. You just gained a long term subscriber and I will be sharing these videos with all of my associates in the tech field. Thanks for the great content brother! Stay frosty. (One thing I will add is that your thumbnails don’t fit exactly to your video style and your channel. They look well made I just don’t think they flow with the channel. It’s a format I’m not used to seeing as a viewer and maybe it’ll grow on me, I would suggest experimenting with new styles but what do I know, I’m a dying 1K subs old washed up channel lol. Your thumbnails are way better than anything I could create myself.)

Nice video. Surprising results. Thanks for exploring this.

Thanks for this great video! I like the theme, cutting and presentation very much! Keep going! Thank you ✌️

Thank you!! God, I've wanted to see this (and the application video too!) done, to see just how delicate this shit is. EXCELLENT!

Your videos are really good to watch. Wont take long till you get millions of subs. Good Job.

Actually,about what i expected. Great Video!

Awesome!! Would not have guessed these results...

*J'adore ces expériences, je trouve qu'elles font avancer !* Ça rassure de savoir que mettre un peu ou beaucoup de pâte thermique ne change pas grand chose ... Merci pour cette démonstration .

Not what I expected! I thought it would run much hotter, and throttle heavily. Thanks for doing this test!

Thanks for doing the tests

You make really good videos! Hope you get more viewers and subscribers to reflect the quality of your content!

Really good testing presentation

Interesting results, I honestly thought with an AIO, a good one with cool temps on the cold plate anyway, would perform alright without paste. My takeaway from this though... is that if you have higher temps than with no thermal paste at all... re-applying the paste might not be a bad idea.

It would have been good if you set the CPU fans to a specific number, that increase of 200rpm slightly altered the results.

Thanks for this video, took a lot of bravery to run without paste!!!

I went to ITT and we used thermal paste here and there and in my working with hardware through years, you would find it in the oddest places from voltage regulators on old weird places, but it was always said "it just fills the small gaps, it most cases it's not even needed". But you learn that paste gives you the edge to ensure those tiny gaps are filled to ensure contact is made. This video clearly proves that old saying :)

Made me feel better about not overthinking how much paste I need exactly on my cpu.

Very nice demonstration of Thermal Paste !!!

Another great and informational video,,,,,, well explained and detailed!

Sometimes I reuse my thermal paste and add just a little if remove the heatsink. Always use "smooth like a butter" to apply the thermal paste.

I am definitely not an expert but I think it mostly depends on what cooler you have, if you have a super cooler than maybe you don’t need thermal paste, but if you have something like a stock cooler than I think adding thermal paste will have a huge benefit

Thanks for this! I'm doing my first build. Just picked up a Ryzen 5 5600X. But I forgot to get the thermal paste. So I just bought some from Amazon.

You’re underrated, just earned a sub my friend

I think the real difference is the quality of the radiator when dry mount. Else, I also think that applying the paste on it (and spreading) instead of doing that on the CPU, will give slightly better result, as the CPU cap is quite smooth, while the cooler is rough and using too thin layer on the CPU will not fill up all the gaps when pressed

Damn!! So this where that little voice comes from all the time... Thanks!

amazing results

Searched "no thermal paste" just out of curiosity and came across your awesome channel. I always thought the thermal paste debate was a little silly. Just dab some goop on there and move on with life. Anyways thanks for content!

Interesting results! I had a PS3 that sat for a few years that wouldn't turn on beyond flashing a heat warning. The fix was fresh thermal paste.

Thx for the info! I'll be adding it to the 13900k :)

just stumbled upon your chanel, and we suprisingly have a very similar build!

really cool video, thank you for doing it on your hardware so I didn't have to! :D

Good video get good comment. Was on the border on whether I should buy some or not. This was a great video too

Really good video brother

I expect your CPU to overheat and your system to throttle and maybe freeze? Edit: Not even close! Oh well. The b&w part was great

Subscribed! Thanks for the video

good editing, good video.

Thanks for these videos about thermal paste, good to at last have a go to point for pointing out some proven proof, of ideas most of us has just assumed!

Really good content!

Quick and simple answer, yes absolutely

Love your videos :)

As others have mentioned I think cooler quality matters. I run Pentuim III (both Coppermine and Tualatin variants), Xeon E5450, Xeon E56xx and X56xx series as well as an I7 970 all without paste, and everything works just fine. There are 22 CPUs in total. All the machines are either name brand servers (HP, Compaq, IBM, Dell) with quality parts and good airflow, except the I7 which has a good aftermarket air cooler. After about 8 years in a non-airconditioned room with Australian summer ambient temperature, nothing has shown any sign of heat-related problems.

My prediction: I think it really depends on what kind of heatsink you're using, and how good the contact is. A good quality, well fitting heatsink should (in theory, I think) function decent without thermal paste (maybe a few degrees higher in temp), since metal on metal contact should conduct heat relatively well along with the dissipation from the fan. I'd guess that in probably 80% or so scenarios, the engineering of the proc/heatsink together would be decent enough to compensate. I might also be biased because I'm still running a gaming desktop from 2011, and it still runs fairly cool (upper 20s- lower 30s C when not under load) despite me never reapplying thermal paste after building it. But I'm also drunk, so let's see what happens.

the surface of the CPU and the Cooler might be without gaps and don't need a filler. Other CPUs and their Coolers might have bigger gaps. Also i wonder if the thermal paste keeps CPU and Cooler a bit separated, so that they don't fuse with each other over time 🤔

Hey I know this is an old video but there is generally no need to worry about the CPU cooler not making good contact with the CPU and it frying anything. Generally all modern processors have sophisticated throttling and other safety measures in place to prevent it just heating up and frying, including the IHS. The core is generally under that metal heat spreader that is installed from the factory on a majority of modern desktop processors that already acts as a small heatsink (also prevents chipping the die from installing and removing the heatsink). In fact, a long time ago Toms Hardware did a test in which they removed the CPU heatsink while a computer was gaming in the early 2000's I believe. They found that the socket AMD Athlon processors of the time (thunderbird cores) just went up in smoke and died (they didn't have an in-die thermal diode so they were not self aware of how hot they were), taking the mobo with them in many cases, but Pentium 3 processors crashed and protected themselves and the mobo, and Pentium 4s gracefully throttled and would even resume working as if nothing had happened once the cooler was placed back on the CPU. The Pentium 4s were also one of the first mainstream desktop processors to get an IHS. You could say the Pentium 4 was the first mainstream processor to get modern CPU overheating protection. I believe AMD also added a thermal diode in their next Athlon XP cores and began implementing their own overheating protection.

Would have liked to see this test with a normal stock air cooler.

Any test with thin 0,2mm copper sheet as pad? I have tried with 0,2mm fine silver sheet, with great result -5 celcius for 5900x. I think the pad must has malleable and pressable feature (clay-like), so can adapt to the gap.

Thanks for the research. I have a non cpu application that thermal paste may not provide a benefit, but thermal epoxy is still an option. These Thermal Interface Materials, TIM, seem to work less by being a thermal conductor, than by eliminating a non-thermal conductor - air. My research will be to attach a Peltier to heat an aluminum plate in a vacuum chamber. With no air insulation gap between the ceramic face of the Peltier and the aluminum plate, heat conduction should be better than at normal atmosphere. There may still be a need for epoxy, but this demonstration is insightful.

I expect higher temps due to air gaps. No plate is perfectly flat. I think I saw no-paste benchmarks before and it's often a "did not finish the test" type of result... Then again I don't remember for sure... (We all saw that the small dot from before was pretty warm...) Edit after watching: Wow. Goes to show beefy water coolers can really do a heck of a job. Even with less than ideal conditions.

All this video proved was that you have very nice and even mounting pressure :)

Was the fan speed the same in both of these tests? If it is temperature regulated (which I'm sure it is), you might have it at bad comparison since fan was spinning faster when you tested with no thermal paste.

lol, that clip at the end!

Not surprised at your findings at all, Not used thermal paste in any of my past PC's for 25+ years, never had any overheating issues either.

Thx for this video. I have tested this years ago, and its no suprise to me. Its almost irrelevant which thermal paste you use. You can buy whatever you want, the only difference is the money you spend.

If you had a perfectly flat heat spreader and a perfectly flat heat sink mount, you could probably get away with no thermal paste. However that is not the case. Never run a system with no thermal paste.

It's interesting, my kraken z63 sprung a leak in the radiator and the effects were immediate, my cpu usage shot to 100% and overheated within a min, it even had thermal paste. I couldn't even boot into windows before it shut down again. Once I put my air cooler back on it was fine. Yet, here you are with no paste and getting stable temps with normal usage. You should have used an air cooler also, cause maybe my failure was due to no liquid being circulated.

I'd love to see you do the same testing with a mid-level air cooler. That water cooler is very capable of absorbing so much more heat that yes, no-paste differences are minimal, but due to the nature of water cooling. Could you try it with a $30.00 air cooler? I'll bet there is quite a big difference, but I'll let you try it! I'm on a budget!

this moreso proves how awesome ur aio is

Great video

i have dozens of times had to set up a quick thest bench pc to run some hdd recovery software i would just find a mobo, a cpu and a few sticks of ram a psu and sata cables and just a cpu cooler laying around, i would just throw the cooler on the cpu and not use thermal greese or strap it down i just just place it and launch the program i needed and let it work, works fine you just need a chunk of metal to be honest for a cooler

I like that epic outro 😆😆

Somewhat warmer, but not like a 1000 degrees C. Because the cooler matters, not the paste, the paste helps to even out the two surfaces. Sometimes they touches.

I'd like to see this same test with an air cooler. Liquid is much better at removing heat so I'm curious if the results would be similar with an air cooler.

Loved it

Your videos are great. Well structured and informative. I really like the gag-insterts.

that aio is plenty powerful enough to handle a 150w load, that measly 65 watts isn't going to suffer to much with out any thermal compound, so long as you have a solid connection, apply enough pressure and the surfaces mate well, the thermal compound helps transfer the heat in the areas that are not mating that well. so that said, no thermal compound will render higher temps, cause the cpu to loose some performance, but doubt it will damage the newer cpus made in say the last 5 years or so as they will throttle or shut down to save themselves. if all you need to do is post your system, no thermal compound is perfectly fine, just make sure to remove the plastic cover first

Now do this test with an original Athlon, lol. The system will post, then pretty much freeze a bit after Windows loads. Honestly, this video did surprise me. Gotta hand it to the engineers, modern CPU and motherboard thermal designs have come a long way in the past 20 years.

As a temporary solution until your thermal paste arrives, none is great

My laptop (no paste) : 100° in stock with throttling. Going to the shop right now.

"Alass for you and for science i turned on the machine" , i know the feeling, you get my sub :}

Great content, your channel should blow up soon!

How do you not have more subs!

NGL I loved that little skit in black in white

The thing about thermal paste is, once it's getting too old (especially crappy thermal paste) it's going to have a negative effect because it might crack, leaving areas with zero contact. On my old laptop (about 8 years old) the temps were always quite fine, but one day it suddenly started to get really bad. Turns out the old thermal paste was dry as hell and actually cracked in the middle (leaving an air pocket of a few mm there).

I always use thermal paste when building of course. But I did get some celerons and pentiums from different generations for testing boards and I don’t put anything at all on top. I used to, but one day I decided to pull the heat sync off with hwmonitor open and it only went up 5c, so now I just save the time and skip it

Excellent.

I ran my ryzen 7 3700x for a year and half without have the stock cooler on properly I lifted it up and seen the thermal paste all dried up. Only 1 quarter of the cpu was covered with thermal paste that was usable. Only noticed when I had to upgrade it, funtimes

Ok after video comment. I expected a throttle, color me impressed. Don’t do this but I was more curious about no cooler on the chip. To see if it throttled and ran or shut down or became damaged.

Next: what happens if you try to reuse thermal paste: for instance, you put thermal paste, bench your pc and find out that the heat sink isn't making propper contact. So you remove the heatsink, you confirm that it wasn't making proper contact, and then.... everybody says you need to reaply the thermal paste, but maybe just spread it again will do the trick?

If he would've locked the cpu fan speed to a static rpm, I'm sure it would be a few degrees higher than we just saw. I would estimate around 2-4°c more.

I mean, one expected there to be an air gap, however minimal, which might be slightly insulating, or just not really well-conducting, and temperatures will tend to be considerably higher, and/or the CPU will considerably down-clock to compensate for terrible [or "not as good"] cooling performance. Much like the "tiny dot" in the prior experiment showed massively higiher temperatures vs. well, ANY other thermal paste method with a "sufficient amount." But, who knows, right?

I'm expecting thermal throttling. Imma watch the video now. Looks like I was wrong! I just wanted to add though that these results are very short-term, in the long term this might be a little different.

After my brain did a screeching halt asking itself "did I just see someone suggest mayonnaise?" I most certainly wanted to see if you would try PeinTech's suggestion of mayonnaise. Or, would address that comment at all. And, honestly, once we get into condiments, would ketchup or mustard be more effective than mayo? BBQ sauce? Teriyaki? This is the truly deep, existential thought that occurred to me during the Pause The Video moment.

This is a bit weird, in my case, last week I applied my thermal paste 3 times and see a higher difference on temps. I re-applied it because I though it's wasn't well applied before. Using an Bifrost 240mm Water Cooler, made by Riotoro (believe me, it's a very, very good WC). The thermal paste I'm using is the Noctua NT-H2. Now I'm getting temps around 50º and 62º C on full load with my i5 9600k at 5.0GHz and 1.29 on vcore. The difference I have seen in temps before was something around 2~3º C.

How about test the stock AMD cooler you used in the paste distribution test? Those channels between the heat tubes are sure to cause issues when there's no paste on the CPU.

How often should thermal paste be replaced? And if the fan/heatsink was removed from the top of CPU, must replace the thermal paste or we can simply place the fan/heatsink back on as-is?

Repasted a Ps3 slim once, forgot to plug in fan *facepalm* just curious if cooler plus paste minus plugging in fan would work? Would be interesting. Ps3 shut itself off and i expect a PC would do the same if it had the safety feature built-in

I would like to think efficiency of heat transfer will matter more when we go to higher watt cpu usages like drawing more power for overclocking same die. For default power draw maybe chips are efficient already.

It might not hit thermal limit at idle, will easily hit it at load. Not sure if it will shut down, but I have to guess so I'll say "no, there's enough cooling." Surprisingly usable under light load, crappy and slow when you try to actually stress it. No damage, ofc.

Thermal paste is just to ensure a smooth and complete contact surface with your cooler, because the heat transfer is made by conduction and to do that there needs to be surface to surface contact its not actually designed to keep it cool, although over the years some companies do try to provide products that help improve cooling