Old XPS - Thermal PAD upgrade success story

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I have an old dell XPS desktop from 2017 with a 1080 / i7 8700 (not K). Due to storage/ram upgrades over the years it still games pretty well but was often stupidly loud / hot in the room. It occurred to me that since the cooler was still the stock one the system came with the thermal paste could be burnt trash.  I haven't done a part build for 15 years but have always been comfortable with the process.

 

I decided to replace the 7 year old factory thermal paste (original from dell) with a phase change pad (thermal grizzly).  I went from thermal throttling for about 70% of a 10 minute multicore Cinibench R23 run to only 2% of the time based on hwinfo (with 83C average temperature); basically it just thermal throttles at the very start presumably as the pad changes.  That may not sound impressive but remember this is a prebuilt small case with a stock cooler.  Oddly this only improved my score performance about 5% (~6950 to 7290) but I am loving the fact my office is finally cool rather than needing to have a window open in winter and run a fan in the window in april.  I'm sure this also means I'm using less power but I didn't measure.  Soo far great purchase to extend the life of this aging rig.