repasting Best Thermal Compound for Laptops?

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Thermalright TFX, SYY-157 

[Biohazard777]

48 minutes ago, manikyath said:

and if your laptop gets such insane thermal cycles that it wrecks the paste in months, you need to RMA that thing yesterday, because that is a design flaw like i've never seen one. these things (legally have to) come with a 2 year warranty at least in the EU, so if the stock paste doesnt last 2 years, every single one of them is gonna come on RMA. does that sound reasonable to you?

That is the thing, the stock paste is adequate for the job. It won't win any medals but it will perform within spec for years.
Once people try some of the enthusiast grade thermal pastes the issue occurs, typically if the paste is kinda runny.

 

Pretty much all of my laptops (and I've had quite a lot over the past 15 years) were medium/high range with dedicated GPUs, and every single one of them had extreme thermal cycles (game, take a break, game, browse the internet, run a 5-10 minute compile on it, then fiddle around the IDE a bit then compile again).
As as long as they aren't thermal throttling they are good... Being just 5c bellow thermal throttling under a heavy load is actually great engineering work, plenty of gaming laptops can't do that (usually thin ones with inflated prices, you know the kind LTT usually promotes and never actually does an in-depth review ).

[manikyath]

23 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

every single one of them had extreme thermal cycles

every desktop cpu these days will gladly boost until 95°c. you dont need a laptop to see this happen.

[Biohazard777]

58 minutes ago, manikyath said:

every desktop cpu these days will gladly boost until 95°c. you dont need a laptop to see this happen.

Every desktop CPU has a heat spreader nowadays...

 

And no, not every single desktop CPU nowadays will boost until 95°c, that is just false.

[ipkpjersi]

Thermal compound type doesn't really matter all that much unless you're going to be delidding and putting it directly on your CPU die underneath your CPU's internal heat spreader.

 

Thermal compounds are generally within a few degrees of each other, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Liquid metal is generally the best, but it's conductive so be careful - or just pick a non-conductive thermal compound.

[gen_angry]

I just use a big 45g tube of Arctic MX-4 myself. You can get them in even bigger tubes and it's good for bulk builds. Plus they have a neat verification code thing to ensure that you got a legit product. Just avoid buying them from Amazon, way too many fake pastes on there from all brands.

 

As a bit of a side note: I would avoid working on any 'work computers' unless that's actually part of your job. You really don't want to take on that liability if something goes wrong. Leave all of the repairs and stuff to your actual IT department and/or whoever your company has a service contract with.

[noniq]

9 hours ago, ipkpjersi said:

Thermal compound type doesn't really matter all that much unless you're going to be delidding and putting it directly on your CPU die underneath your CPU's internal heat spreader.

On a regular laptop, CPUs never have a lid. You are always putting the thermal compound directly on the die.

 

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As a bit of a side note: I would avoid working on any 'work computers' unless that's actually part of your job. You really don't want to take on that liability if something goes wrong. Leave all of the repairs and stuff to your actual IT department and/or whoever your company has a service contract with.

Just a mall company with less than 50 employees. We don't have a contractor for IT, we do it ourselves. I just repasted a bunch of old ThinkPads that we give to interns because they had gotten loud over the years.

[noniq]

12 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

And no, not every single desktop CPU nowadays will boost until 95°c, that is just false.

Well, most would if you let them, but since desktops usually have decent cooling most of them can't unless you fiddle around in your BIOS (e.g. unlock Power Limits).

The majority of users leave those settings untouched.

[Biohazard777]

2 hours ago, noniq said:

Well, most would if you let them, but since desktops usually have decent cooling most of them can't unless you fiddle around in your BIOS (e.g. unlock Power Limits).

The majority of users leave those settings untouched.

Exactly, you'd have to go out of your way to hit 95°C on most of them.
Hence why "gladly" is an overstatement and "you don't need a laptop to see this" is plain wrong for vast majority of desktop users, while not being uncommon at all for laptop users.

Spoiler

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x

https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-5800h

Please note that this doesn't mean you can not go over 90 on desktop, and it doesn't mean every laptop will allow 105 (most manufacturers put a limit a hard limit few degrees less than max)... But it does show the difference and what one can expect out of the box.

[ipkpjersi]

On 6/7/2023 at 6:04 AM, noniq said:

On a regular laptop, CPUs never have a lid. You are always putting the thermal compound directly on the die.

 

Just a mall company with less than 50 employees. We don't have a contractor for IT, we do it ourselves. I just repasted a bunch of old ThinkPads that we give to interns because they had gotten loud over the years.

Oops, you're right, I was thinking about my older Clevo laptop that has a full desktop 4790k which I delidded. My mistake lol