Best thermal paste

WARburton

WARburton

WARburton

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Joined
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What’s the best thermal paste for a gaming laptop without using Liquid Metal.
I don’t mind using LM but not on a laptop one drop and it’s all over the place
 
These sort of threads always attract debate but you cannot go wrong with good old Arctic MX-4. Good value for money, not electrically conductive and a great performing paste in general :)
 
Philtor said:
These sort of threads always attract debate but you cannot go wrong with good old Arctic MX-4. Good value for money, not electrically conductive and a great performing paste in general :)
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Agree, I've been using it for years and just bough some more.
 
My go-to paste is usually MX4, but for something like a GPU or laptop I'd probably lean toward MX6.

I'm told that the new MX7 is excellent for that sort of thing too, but have yet to use it myself.
 
Gray2233 said:
My go-to paste is usually MX4, but for something like a GPU or laptop I'd probably lean toward MX6.

I'm told that the new MX7 is excellent for that sort of thing too, but have yet to use it myself.
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Artic silver spread really well, I don't like the ultra thick compounds, makes the spreading the toast method difficult
 
The latest MX7 is on par with MX4. I can't say if it's any better as I've not done anything scientific, but it's certainly no worse.
 
Just for reference. I recently splashed out on a Thermal Grizzly Kryosheet.

Temps are no lower than they were with the previous Arctic Mx4 or Noctua NT-H2, that I used with the same CPU.

Lesson learned.
 
I was going to splash out on the Honeywell stuff that everybody says is a good as LM.

I got some MX-4 so I’ll just use that if there is no real difference
 
hornetstinger said:
Just use a slightly bigger rpm to make up the difference.
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CPU hits 90c and fans run at 100% in games (45w mode)

CPU is a 10870h and I know paste the as never been replaced, it’s definitely time. If I’m doing it I may as well do it right.
It only cost’s £10 on offer
 
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I can only comment on my own previous experience, but I've not had the best experience with MX4 paste when specifically dealing with laptops.

In each case the paste dried out far too soon, and performance dropped off quite a bit, obviously struggling to deal with continuous high temperatures, especially if we're talking gaming laptops, and they usually bounce off thermal limits.

I've had better results from Thermal Grizzly.

But if I was ready to repaste my current 4090 laptop, I'd be using Honeywell PTM7950. It's currently using LM from factory (Asus) but I'm not tempted to do that to my laptop.
 
i put LM on everything but im just not in a rush to put in om my laptop. i only really us it when i travel so it will get bumped about a bit in bags.
ive found a seller that looks to sell genuine Honeywell PTM7950 so im going to give it a go
 
FlyingFish said:
I can only comment on my own previous experience, but I've not had the best experience with MX4 paste when specifically dealing with laptops.

In each case the paste dried out far too soon, and performance dropped off quite a bit, obviously struggling to deal with continuous high temperatures, especially if we're talking gaming laptops, and they usually bounce off thermal limits.
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Laptops can be tricky with either a lot of heat going through a small patch, or conversely sometimes they have substantially larger heat spreaders than desktop CPUs and/or direct die considerations - I'd probably err towards MX-6 on stuff like gaming laptops where there is a lot of heat in a smaller space and towards pastes designed for spreading in other circumstances (hence stuff like TG which is designed for spreading can produce better results).
 
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