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TLDR: Successfully applied Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads to eliminate thermal throttling on MSI GS65 8RE gaming laptop. I have an MSI GS65 8RE Stealth Thin gaming laptop (i7-8750H, GTX 1060) which has suffered from thermal throttling ever since it was purchased in 2018. It's an old model and there are plenty of reviews so I won't get into any further details or comments about build quality, difficulty of upgrade and so on. Of course, if anyone reading this has any specific questions, please feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer. To solve the thermal throttling problem, I first tried the following "non-invasive" measures with varying degrees of success but the problem was not eliminated; nor was I satisfied having paid for a moderately top-tier hardware package only to limit its capabilities in order to use it for its intended purpose. - Turning off Hyper Threading - Turning off Tubro Boost - Undervolting - Turbo Boost frequency limiting - Package power limiting During heavy gaming (I'm saying "heavy" relative to the performance capacity of this particular hardware) such as Jedi Fallen Order on "Epic" 1080p graphics settings, the CPU would hit 93C with the fans sounding like a 747 during takeoff. HWiNFO showed sustained thermal throttling with the CPU frequency hovering around 2.7Ghz whereas the i7-8750H is rated up to 4.1Ghz boost (2.2Ghz base). Cinebench R20 benchmark scores were hovering around 2250 (average of 3 consecutive runs). Obviously, I did not expect this 17.9mm-thick laptop to be equipped with a cooling solution that can handle the heat dissipation requirements of an i7-8750H processor at its specified 90W, 4.1Ghz boost power limit and frequency, respectively. I would settle for a sustained boost anywhere above 3.0Ghz at its Intel-designated TDP-down power limit of 35W, without thermal throttling being activated. I think that's a fair expectation for hardware at this price point. Having opened the laptop before for SSD and RAM upgrades, I was familiar with its internals. I had also read a lot of users complaining about thermal throttling and claiming they were able to fix it with a re-paste of the heat sink fan rig. So I took the plunge and re-pasted the HSF with Arctic MX-4 thermal compound. Ensuring proper contact upon replacement of the cooling hardware on the motherboard and taking care to not bend or twist any part of it, I closed up the laptop and booted. No improvement. I was disappointed, to say the least, and I began to regret my purchase. That was last year. Fast-forward to the present and I came across a post where a user had not only re-pasted the CPU and GPU but also replaced the thermal pads on the VRAM and other surrounding components. I decided to give it one last shot. I opened it up (this is an achievement by itself, just look up a teardown video), cleaned up the old paste, applied new paste and replaced the thermal pads. This time I used Arctic Silver 5 and Arctic Thermal Pads (1.5mm thick). I also did something that may be frowned upon: I replaced all thermal pads, regardless of stock pad thickness (which varied from 0.5mm to 1mm and 2mm in one area) with 1.5mm and a 1.5+1.5mm thermal pad sandwich for the 2mm. To make sure that the copper parts of the HSF rig were properly making contact with the CPU and GPU, I carefully placed the HSF rig back over the motherboard and held it in place without the screws. Then I meticulously squished each of the thermal pads where they were too thick, causing a gap between the other contact points. Now the HSF was sitting flat on the CPU and GPU. Next I slowly removed the HSF rig ensuring not to let the thermal pads peel off or shift. After applying the thermal compound on the CPU and GPU, I again placed the HSF rig back on and screwed it in place. I had extra thermal pad left over so I placed one on top of what looked like the PCH (maybe?), as well as beneath and above the two NVMe SSDs and on both RAM sticks. After closing up carefully ensuring all the cables and screws were securely in place, I booted up and ran Cinebench R20. To my absolute and complete delight, the core temp value reported by HWiNFO did not exceed 84C. By the way, I had a stable undervolt of -155mV already set, which obviously helped. The machine sustained a boost frequency around 3.3Ghz at 35W power limit and resulted in an average Cinebench score of 2460 over three consecutive runs. Other than undervolt and power limit, there are no other performance/heat limiting settings enabled. For good measure, I also ran Prime95 stress test and Unigine Heaven graphics benchmark to check system stability. All checked out. Temperatures did not exceed 84C. I want to clarify that this was in a non-AC room where the ambient was around 24C which is on the warm side of comfortable. Needless to say, thermal performance would be even better in a cooler environment. The Nvidia GTX 1060 hits 90C running Heaven benchmark on Extreme preset but the CPU caps out at 71C. The fans are loud, which is to be expected, but they run noticeably quieter than before. For reference, the max fan speed set in MSI Dragon Center is 65% for CPU and 75% for GPU. I hope this helps anyone else facing similar problems. And as I said earlier, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask!

I've been occasionally repasting both my personal Laptops and some devices at work. But I've always run into issues: The temps are great for the first couple days, but just a few weeks / months after repasting, the CPU is back to old temps. One year later, I even had a few devices crashing because of the CPU overheating under load. After some googling, it turns out that the regular thermal paste (Arctix MX4 / MX5) that I've been using, isn't ideal for direct die application. I suppose it doesn't as well, because of pump out. Reddit recommends to go with high viscosity thermal compound, such as Gelid GC Extreme or Honeywell PTM7950. What is generally considered the best price/performance thermal compound for laptops? And is there a difference in what I should use between repasting office and gaming laptops?

I have an rtx 2060 super FE model grpahics card, and in my opinion, the temps have been.... not great, especially because I enjoy overclocking and the temps don't really allow it too much. I am considering replacing the stock paste with something aftermarket. Currently I have half a tube worth of noctua nt-h1 What would be the temp difference between stock and ht-h1? would it be worth it? or should I go a bit higher with something like conductonaut liquid metal? If neither of these sound like a good idea, can someone recommend a good paste/liquid metal or other way to decrease temps?(I don't have the money to go with water cooling)

Hi guys, just opened my i5-6200u laptop for a re-paste, and noticed that the integrated graphics heat spreader has no thermal compound, and doesn't even make contact with the copper heat pipe/heatsink. Anyone know why that is? I've applied some and sealed her up, but just wondering what you guys would have done in my position. Thanks!

I'm going to be replacing the two fans in my laptop (MSI GP75 Leopard) and repasting both the CPU and GPU. I've been having thermal problems and one of the fans is rattling, even after cleaning. Already got the fans picked out, but I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for the best thermal paste to get that works on the CPU and GPU? Thanks!

Hi I've a MSI GE62 6qd apache pro and lately my temps have been bad while fans are at max speed. It has never been repasted since the 7 years I've had it. I've decided I'm going to repaste it but also want to replace the thermal pads while I have it apart. Only a issue is that I don't know what size and thickness to get for the thermal pads. Also tips on thermal paste and pads are always welcome. I won't put liquid metal on it as I'm always caring it around and don't want to risk breaking it or having to redo it every year.

So, I spilled some Coke on my Lenovo legion 5 2021. Unfortunately we don't have official services in my country, so I wanted to disassemble and clean laptop myself. But, a read about legion proprietary thermal paste and that you must not replace it with commercial one cause they are not that effective. So, my idea was just remove heatsink and leave thermal paste be on CPU, GPU and sink itself, and after cleaning my Coke mess, put it back without replacing thermal paste. Would it work or and is there some possible issues that can occur? Laptop, by the way, is 2 weeks old and after incident and some basic clean up on motherboard it passed 30 minutes stress test with average temp of 78-80 C without any problems and shorting out))) So, can I do what I planned? Thanks in advance!

I am thinking of repasting my MSI twinfrozr oc edition GTX 770 just out of curiosity and because the temps kind of bug me a little (running the witcher 3 they cap out at whatever i set them to in afterburner). I am thinking of using Noctua NT-H1 and using the spread method (any criticism and/or addvice is more then welcome). Anyway my real question is if i can crack the gpu die by overtightening the screws on the aftermarket cooler or are they limited so that noobs like me don't destroy their gpu's. Thank you in advance and sorry for the stupid question i just can't find any information about wether the screws on aftermarket coolers added by companies like MSI,ASUS,EVGA etc. can be overtightend and destroy the die. Also excuse my english its not my mother tongue.