In this article, we will be going over the 05 signs that your thermal paste is bad. This isn’t a technical article so it’s very easy to understand for people who don’t have any knowledge about computers. In other articles, I have talked about the importance of having good quality thermal paste and how it can help keep your computer running at normal temperatures after you reapply it. For those who want to know more about the importance of thermal paste click here. For now, let’s quickly jump into the ten signs that your thermal paste is bad!
1. Gelled Thermal Paste:
The first sign would be gelled thermally conductive paste which has happened to me before and I didn’t know what was happening. At first, I thought that it might be cured because apparently some thermal pastes cure after a while and this is supposed to fix the issue of having air bubbles in your paste or it can help heat transfer more effectively. Well, turns out that wasn’t the case at all! After you apply the gelled thermal paste onto your CPU, you can actually scrape it off easily which means that it really isn’t going to work properly. If you have a tube of gelled thermal paste, I suggest that you just throw it away. In fact, throwing it away is better than giving this stuff to someone because the gelled state isn’t good for anything as seen from the image below.
2. Low Viscosity Paste
The second sign would be low viscosity paste which a lot of people have actually had this problem before and they don’t even realize it! If you want to test whether or not your thermal paste is bad, use the pea method which means that you take some thermal paste on your finger and apply it to your CPU. Take a look at the image below.
If you do this, you will be able to find out whether or not your thermal paste is bad easily. You can tell when you use the pea method because it’s going to be too thin in most cases and in fact, some thermal pastes that are low viscosity don’t even work. The paste isn’t going to spread out very easily and it might end up looking like a blob which is why low viscosity paste is quite bad. If you haven’t done this before, I suggest that you do it now because it’s the only way to find out if your thermal paste is bad.
3. Improper Ratio of Metal and Salts:
The third sign would be a thermal paste that is mixed with the wrong ratios of metal and salt! If your thermal paste doesn’t have the correct ratio, there are chances that it will cure after some time which means you are going to have air bubbles inside of your heatsink or CPU block. If you don’t think this is bad enough, I suggest that you read articles on the internet about people who have had their CPUs die because of air bubbles!
A lot of synthetic thermal pastes, especially ones that are low viscosity usually come with metal particles which means there is more than one type of metal in your paste. For example, the Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste has a mixture of Aluminum and silver which is really bad because aluminum oxide isn’t good for CPUs. If you have an AMD CPU, I suggest that you never use any metal pastes like this one.
4. Corroding Paste:
The fourth sign would be corrosion! If your thermal paste corrodes, it’s going to be an indicator that your paste is bad and from cheap metal particles. The reason why corrosion occurs is that the salt in your thermal past will react with the other materials and metals which causes ions to form. Ions are unstable and can cause a lot of damage if there are enough of them which means you might have to replace your CPU if there are enough ions in it. This is why I suggest that you never use cheap thermal pastes because they are usually from very cheap materials that create corrosion when in contact with each other!
5. Cracking Paste:
The fifth sign would be cracking paste which means that the paste might have air bubbles in it or that your paste is low-quality. If you want to test this, use the pea method and if it doesn’t spread out evenly, there are chances that you have a cracking paste which isn’t good at all! It’s another sign that your paste is bad so either remove the old paste or get a new one because it’s going to be a waste of money if you don’t.