Is it Worth Changing the Thermal Paste on Your Laptop? 

It's extremely important to keep track of which screw goes in which hole. If you put a long screw in a shallow hole, you may drive it through the motherboard.

Usually removing dust from the fan makes for a bigger improvement. But the difference in performance doesn't tell the whole story. Maybe the Laptop now delivers the same performance but cooler and/or with a lower fanspeed (-> quieter).

Good to know, that will save me a lot of headache. Thank you for showing!

You'll only gain performance is it's been thermal throttling, the main purpose of a fresh thermal paste is to lower temps.

I wouldn't expect a big performance difference from repasting for a lower end machine, but cleaning may make it really silent.

Cinebench is a better benchmark for testing new thermal paste. Geekbench is not long enough for a PC to hit the thermal wall, therefore it is not going to show much of a difference even if there is one.

I have found that often times re-pasting and cleaning out the dust in the sink don’t actually greatly improve performance. Instead, it will typically lower fan noise. Because the system no longer has to work as hard. To achieve the same level of cooling.

Yes. Did it a few days ago and discovered some of the thermal paste applied by acer did not even have enough contact to the heat sink. There was atleast 3mm gaps between the heat sinks. Some thermal pads are missing.

Looks like the CPU is changeable too.

Gary, when you reapply thermal paste you should measure TEMPERATURE not benchmarks (ideally, both). The more likely benefit is reduced temps and hence your fan(s) kicking up less, resulting in less noise. If your CPU was throttled before because you were hitting a temperature threshold (such as 100c on the older Intel Macbooks), you might get boosted performance, especially for prolonged workloads, as it would have to throttle less, or not at all. Wish you included before and after CPU temperatures and ran more tests in general.

Thanks, I use a Thinkpad P52 for heavy duty workloads

The issue is not a performance increase, it's whether the system shuts down unexpectedly when under heavy load due to overtemp. I have an older HP notebook (13 years) that is doing this on a regular basis. If I don't push it too hard and monitor the CPU temperature with the free utility Core-Temp, I'm good to go. However, if I push the system with too many Chrome tabs and play full screen video, I can watch the CPU temp rise until it shuts itself down (without warning). Not Nice. I have not taken the time yet to disassemble and replace the thermal paste since as you point out it is a fairly complex and fiddly job. I have taken the bottom cover off and blown out the dust in the fan, etc. That helped a little, but did not fix the whole problem. I am presuming the thermal paste on the CPU is the issue. It would have been nice if you established a baseline with Core-Temp on your system with varying loads, then compared the actual CPU temps after the thermal paste replacement, to see if that resulted in better headroom for the cooling system. Otherwise, great video warning about the pitfalls of notebook disassembly, and sources of teardown examples.

I have a Zephyrus G14 2022. Replaced the TIM with Laird TPCM7100. Gained better temps compared to stock Liquid Metal because the stock application was so bad. You can check my post on the Zephyrus G14 subreddit including before after pics and test results.

Any change in fan speeds or thermals (e.g., skin touch)?

i have overheating issues on my dell latitude e 7440 laptop,some engineer suggest me to change thermal paste but am very worry about to change it coz its need to be open all genuine company setting so what can i do now? laptop specialist give me suggestion pls...

When asking (and answering) a question like this, a good idea would be to show before and after temperature numbers, as the end performance alone doesnt tell the whole story. I am surprised you skipped that part, regardless of whether or not you just wanted to measure performance, the temps show us how close the CPU is to thermal throttling threshold after re-pasting. Also, most people replace paste in a laptop to improve thermals and reduce throttling situations and not because of performance (this is a nice side bonus).

When removing the heatsink / fan assembly from the processor be careful if the processor appears to be stuck to the heatsink. Some of the thermal pads used on older machines seem to stick like glue when cold and you could end up pulling the processor out of the socket even though the locking mechanism is still shut.

The performance may not be what makes this effort worthwhile. As you point out, the extra thermal transfer should keep it within thermal limits on hot days.

I have an old Dell laptop that was overheating. It turnrd out tte heatpipes had failed - replacing them and paste at the same time made a huge difference to the gam speed and CPU temperature.

for me it wasn't performance I was after, I wanted a cooler CPU and I did, lowered it by 8C when watching videos which I mostly use it for.