Thermal paste

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What the hell has happened to thermal paste prices? Some are £50+??

Can anyone receommend some thermal paste to use when refitting stock coolers on 2 graphics cards I’ve bought?
 
I had my search set to show highest price first and was shocked to see 30g for £59 :p

Cheers for the suggestion, I’ll pick some up. :)
 
To be fair you'd get at least 60 applications from 30g, more, realistically so it's a pound per application worst case.

The 1g tube is more like £2.50 per application

The benefits of bulk buying I guess :D
 
hornetstinger said:
I wonder how good lithium grease is for thermal paste? Can buy a 500g tub for £5 LOL.

You'd die of old age before using that 500g tub!

or what about copper grease?
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The problem with stuff not designed for the job is if it doesn't stick and set right, it might squeeze out under heatsink pressure or heat cycling. The copper grease would definitely ruin any circuitry it gets onto, and would be a bugger to clean up.
 
yeah but typically you put tiny amount on, so if it squishes out past the heatspreader it's a tiny amount. Or if I spread in onto the heatspreader like butter, put an incredibly thin layer, as thin as possible. Unless you squeeze out a whole tube lol.

Be interesting if someone can try copper or lithium grease, and artic silver or something similar.
 
Only watched half of it, the copper slip worked well, unsurprisingly, but it's highly conductive so you'd have to be very careful with it.

Cheap alternative to liquid metal Tim I wonder?
I'm not sure how temperature might thin it out though, last thing you want is it turning to liquid at high temperature and leaking all over the place.

Edit, not sure how stable it would be over multiple heating /cooling cycles either, we'd need to do some long term tests.
 
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mattyfez said:
Only watched half of it, the copper slip worked well, unsurprisingly, but it's highly conductive so you'd have to be very careful with it.

Cheap alternative to liquid metal Tim I wonder?
I'm not sure how temperature might thin it out though, last thing you want is it turning to liquid at high temperature and leaking all over the place.
Click to expand...

yeah good point, heat will make it runnier. Also with lithium grease, it may not be electricity conductive but it could damage the epoxy resin?
 
isnt lithium close to sodium? i remember in school they put sodium in water and it burst into flames. i suppose lithium grease is like 1/1000 lithium or something?
 
Nothing wrong with Arctic MX-4 tbh, 20g Tube is £14.99 on the web, I swapped out my TIM on my GTX980 yesterday and max temps went from 83 down to 71... same room, same load within the same hour with the same room temp.
 
D1craig said:
isnt lithium close to sodium? i remember in school they put sodium in water and it burst into flames. i suppose lithium grease is like 1/1000 lithium or something?
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Yes lithium like sodium is one of the alkali metals and put in water will react quite violently.
Lithium grease though is actually lithium hydroxide based so its already had its reaction. No worries about it bursing into flames

As for good but cheap thermal compound I find MX2 to be almost as good as kryonaut (~1C) and helluv a lot cheaper.
 
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