Recommended Thermal Paste

[Liam_84]

Hi, I was wondering what type of Thermal Paste I should use for installing my new CPU. I've looked around and heard many different things such as oxidization with fans using metal-based pastes.

My new CPU is a AMD A10-6800K APU and it is using the stock heatsink and fan

 

[mdd1963]

Arctic Silver variations have been doing the job for more than a decade....

 

[synphul]

The corrosion problem with different metals (cpu's ihs combined with the base metal of the cooler) are potentially real issues. Metal pastes are somewhat rare though and not the norm. That's something like coollabs liquid pro, liquid ultra etc. Many of those can be thin and runny, a real pain to use. Other 'normal' pastes even those like arctic silver aren't considered 'liquid metal' pastes, they work like standard thermal compound. Most thermal compounds perform similarly within 1-3c of one another.

Honestly the a10-6800k isn't going to get ridiculously hot, why not just use the stock paste that comes with the cooler? That should work fine. If you still feel you want an aftermarket paste, arctic silver 5, mx4, prolimatech pk 1/2/3, noctua nt-h1, shin etsu etc work similarly. Pick up whatever's less expensive, out of those if one paste is $10 and another is $5, may as well grab the $5. The $10 paste isn't going to work twice as good.

 

[Liam_84]

Honestly the a10-6800k isn't going to get ridiculously hot, why not just use the stock paste that comes with the cooler? That should work fine. If you still feel you want an aftermarket paste, arctic silver 5, mx4, prolimatech pk 1/2/3, noctua nt-h1, shin etsu etc work similarly. Pick up whatever's less expensive, out of those if one paste is $10 and another is $5, may as well grab the $5. The $10 paste isn't going to work twice as good.

I can't use the paste that came with it because it didn't come with any... I got it off of ebay with it's cooler and no thermal paste.

Thank you though for recommending some pastes, i've just gotten into desktop computing and i need to upgrade all of my components. I'm running off of really basic knowledge like No Mixing RAM Sizes and things like that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[synphul]

Oh ok, well that makes sense if the cooler was something other than new in box and lacking thermal compound. Most thermal pastes will do just fine. There are a few special cases where things like liquid metal may perform significantly better but also at a much higher price ($20+). For awhile there was a real race for companies to out perform one another and all sorts of exotic materials, silver, diamond paste etc. Anything that sounded like magic in a tube.

Several people went in depth and did a lot of testing, some with 20+ thermal pastes, some tested over 40 different compounds and they all pretty much come to the same conclusion. Average is around 1-3c difference which could easily result from a simple ambient room temp change over the course of the day. A new and improved version of a thermal compound may show half a degree centigrade improvement. Maybe I'm just not as aware but it seems like the race to come out with the 'best' thermal compound has died off quite a bit.