It's extremely important to keep track of which screw goes in which hole. If you put a long screw in a shallow hole, you may drive it through the motherboard. In addition to thermal paste, fans are often replaceable.
Usually removing dust from the fan makes for a bigger improvement. But the difference in performance doesn't tell the whole story. Maybe the Laptop now delivers the same performance but cooler and/or with a lower fanspeed (-> quieter).
Since I am mainly interested in getting the best performance from this old laptop, making it useable in 2023, then the things like lower fan speeds aren't really what I am worried about, however I agree that could be a nice secondary effect.
@@GaryExplains removing fan dust would have helped with the best sustained performance then just best performance, using compressed air can or WD circuit cleaner , without much additional risk or work then already done
Fan dust can indeed be a problem. As I said at the beginning of the video I had several comments asking why didn't I change the thermal paste, so I wanted to satisfy the curiosity of those viewers (and my own) and see if it made any difference.
@@GaryExplains Gary, I don't mean to be a douchbag here but you could handle this better than you have. On the one hand you say you make this video to satisfy some questions we had about thermal paste, but are choosing to be defensive and say you don't care when we give constructive criticism about your testing methodology and what additional information you could have provided. You could have handled this better by either saying nothing at all, or simply saying "ah sorry, I wanted to do this very quickly this time around, will consider if I ever do a future video about this" or something to this effect. It would at least sound a lot better than your utterly unhelpful replies that just leave us feeling politely ignored. You are essentially saying "I don't care" but using 50 words instead of 3. Just my opinion.
You'll only gain performance is it's been thermal throttling, the main purpose of a fresh thermal paste is to lower temps. Quite surprised no test around temps were conducted before & after.
Knowing the temperature as an absolute number wouldn't really help. The question is does the performance change? Does the laptop throttle under load before changing the paste, and after. Clearly there is a difference but a small one.
@@GaryExplains I disagree. That is like saying if your old car still goes goes as fast on the freeway with a 60mph limit there's no reason to change the oil. Or that a graphics setting is useless if it doesn't increase perf in a specific situation with a CPU-bottlenecked system. The laptop might've been on brink of thermal throttling without the paste change and now runs 10c cooler which definitively would make it faster on a hot day or when running heavy tasks for many hours. Preferrably you would have a few test cases done at once. Especially if you only have only one data point (one laptop) you should collect more data of it and post it all. P.S. Also if there's way too much thermal paste (video!) it might also eat up any gains otherwise made. The paste's idea is to form as thin as possible thermal-conducting layer as possible where still connecting the surfaces. Any extra just weakens the thermal conduction ability.
So the oil analogy doesn't really work. Sorry. My aim here was to rejuvenate an old laptop. I think too many people have jumped onto the "thermal paste bandwagon and see it as cure for everything. It isn't, read the comment by @moabswashpot9002. As for the paste, I did remove some of that before proceeding, I forgot that the internet is full of people who obsess about this kind of thing. I should have edited the footage better. Having said that, I have watch plenty of TH-cam videos tjat show that a "excess" of paste makes no difference to the effectiveness. So, I don't see it as a problem.
Cinebench is a better benchmark for testing new thermal paste. Geekbench is not long enough for a PC to hit the thermal wall, therefore it is not going to show much of a difference even if there is one.
Gary, when you reapply thermal paste you should measure TEMPERATURE not benchmarks (ideally, both). The more likely benefit is reduced temps and hence your fan(s) kicking up less, resulting in less noise. If your CPU was throttled before because you were hitting a temperature threshold (such as 100c on the older Intel Macbooks), you might get boosted performance, especially for prolonged workloads, as it would have to throttle less, or not at all. Wish you included before and after CPU temperatures and ran more tests in general. Still, I understand this was a very quick experiment, still appreciate the info. Just wish it was a bit more thorough, as your speculation on benefits is as good as anyone else's.
I am not interested in noise. I am interested in performance. This is a 10 year old laptop is now just about useable due to the rejuvenation I have done. Temp is just a statistic.
The issue is not a performance increase, it's whether the system shuts down unexpectedly when under heavy load due to overtemp. I have an older HP notebook (13 years) that is doing this on a regular basis. If I don't push it too hard and monitor the CPU temperature with the free utility Core-Temp, I'm good to go. However, if I push the system with too many Chrome tabs and play full screen video, I can watch the CPU temp rise until it shuts itself down (without warning). Not Nice. I have not taken the time yet to disassemble and replace the thermal paste since as you point out it is a fairly complex and fiddly job. I have taken the bottom cover off and blown out the dust in the fan, etc. That helped a little, but did not fix the whole problem. I am presuming the thermal paste on the CPU is the issue. It would have been nice if you established a baseline with Core-Temp on your system with varying loads, then compared the actual CPU temps after the thermal paste replacement, to see if that resulted in better headroom for the cooling system. Otherwise, great video warning about the pitfalls of notebook disassembly, and sources of teardown examples.
@@GaryExplains I recently serviced a friend's Dell laptop (Broadwell era i3 or i5 I think) - it never crashed, but he was reporting it as being very slow. I was expecting to find the heat exchanger fins and/or the fan to be entirely blocked with dust. To my surprise the fan was utterly pristine, without a spec of dust - I suspect the fan had been faulty as fitted in the factory, and had never rotated from new. Once a new fan was fitted, he reported it as being "many times faster". I was surprised that thermal throttling was sufficient to stop this machine from reaching the CPU's emergency shut-down temperature, but apparently it was!
Indeed thermal throttling can be a big issue and a broken fan is going to do that. However with a clean, working fan and thermal paste that wasn't dried completely, changing the paste did little for my laptop.
@@GaryExplains You know that if your CPU temperature is consistently high your performance can drop drastically, this is what people are trying to say. Well if it didn't help for you, might help for others, you mentioned that your pc is 10 years old in previous comments I read, specs comes to a play, because your pc might be just outdated for most of the stuff today, if you really want a better pc buy a stationary pc, that are easy to change parts and requires less tedious work. Also I know i'm late so yeah, hope this helps.
Yes. Did it a few days ago and discovered some of the thermal paste applied by acer did not even have enough contact to the heat sink. There was atleast 3mm gaps between the heat sinks. Some thermal pads are missing. Lucky for me i had a lot of thermal pads with different thickness. The temperature improved by atleast 5 degress Celsius. My laptop is an acer nitro 5 2020.
When asking (and answering) a question like this, a good idea would be to show before and after temperature numbers, as the end performance alone doesnt tell the whole story. I am surprised you skipped that part, regardless of whether or not you just wanted to measure performance, the temps show us how close the CPU is to thermal throttling threshold after re-pasting. Also, most people replace paste in a laptop to improve thermals and reduce throttling situations and not because of performance (this is a nice side bonus).
@@GaryExplains I got from other comments that performance is all that interests *you* , but the thumbnail and title have "should YOU replace" and "YOUR laptop", which imo deserves a more broader answer than "performance is all that interests me". Also thermals are more than just statistics.
@@GaryExplains Because lower number translates into battery health. Its also a nice to know if something you have done for the past 20-30 minutes has lowered the working temperature of the laptop you maybe using every day. It shows how much leeway your CPU has before hitting that thermal threshold. Its overall a nice complimentary info to performance numbers.
I have found that often times re-pasting and cleaning out the dust in the sink don’t actually greatly improve performance. Instead, it will typically lower fan noise. Because the system no longer has to work as hard. To achieve the same level of cooling.
Thanks, I use a Thinkpad P52 for heavy duty workloads Recently I added ram and a second ssd I updated the Wi-Fi card as well I was considering disassembling the whole machine to change the thermal paste but I think I will pass
Perhaps it's better to check beforehand if a device is thermal throttling or running excessively hot and doing some performance tests and then deciding whether or not to take it apart and change the thermal paste, clean the fans and so on...
@@GaryExplains Thanks for the video, it was informative. I can agree somewhat with the viewers as back in my country (warm climate) the CPU thermal paste and dust are one of the biggest problems with old laptops.
for me it wasn't performance I was after, I wanted a cooler CPU and I did, lowered it by 8C when watching videos which I mostly use it for. The cooler it is, the longer it will last.
@@AliensInc. Ok. But, it doesn't sound logical to me. I don't know of any negative impact on the internals of a CPU due to heat, assuming the heat level is within the tolerances stated by the manufacturer. 🤷♂️
OK, then why not run it at 5-10C lower than spec and see also why does we even need paste then cos with the cooler tight on it won't go over spec but with def. higher temp.
The performance may not be what makes this effort worthwhile. As you point out, the extra thermal transfer should keep it within thermal limits on hot days. The other thing that can be done is to use very high thermal transfer paste, just to get the best benefit that you can from all the work. 🙂
Replacing the thermal paste stopped my laptop from crashing all the time due overheating. It's important to clean the fan and also replacing thermal paste after 3 or 5 years.
I think it depends on the machine, mine is a Vaio from 2011 with Radeon Graphics, every time I started intensive work like light gaming or converting files to MP4 or other formats, it crashed. The thermal paste was gone after 8 years when I decided to open it. After replacing it, the crashing stopped, and the fan did not go at Maximo speed when in IDLE. @@GaryExplains
Yes it depends on the machine, which I guess was the point I was making. You said it was important to replace the paste and I think some people take that literally and get anxious if they haven't replaced the paste in a couple of years.
I changed the thermal paste on my 2020 HP Envy with a Ryzen 4700U that runs hot (up to 100C)stock so by adding aftermarket paste I managed to cool it down by a good 10 degrees at least.
I have an old Dell laptop that was overheating. It turnrd out tte heatpipes had failed - replacing them and paste at the same time made a huge difference to the gam speed and CPU temperature.
I de-dusted my laptop and replaced the thermal paste and oh my… it’s literally totally silent at idle and at max a slight humming sound while gaming. Before that, fans were spinning at idle and while gaming my laptop felt like an oven and the fans were spinning so fast it felt like it was almost gonna take-off.
A SATA SSD would have already helped reduce internal temps compared to design spec so thermally better starting point already. Repasting, reseating and a clean does no harm on any machine and reduces potential issues due to thernal creep and other contact issues. 2% is a win.
My ASUS RoG's (intel i7 10th gen, gtx 1650 ti) CPU and GPU temperatures started hitting 80-90+ while on idle, mostly due to my attempts to crypto mine on it, which permanently reduced performance on it (noticeable while gaming). After realizing it wasn't worth mining, I decided to put thermal paste in the laptop. Straight away the temps came back to a normal 40-60C, though it still doesn't feel as fast as before sadly.
@@GaryExplains i mean yeah performance is not really a big difference but it would be interesting if new thermalpast does improve thermals by a lot if performance is almost identical?!
I was also considering doing the same but was reluctant because of the effort involved. My laptop is having 3rd gen ryzen 5 processor and it often spikes to 90-95 degrees. I'm curious if it results in any temperature difference even if it doesn't improve the performance. 🤔
I have done revamps on 3 different laptops and the results always differed. I would say SSD change + RAM boost will have a clear improvement for sure. The thermal paste change would probably depend on the processor size more than anything. My Asus z14 laptop barely showed any change after changing the paste, probably 5 degress C decrease in temp but my gaming laptop showed a clear improvement dropping almost 25 degrees directly after changing the paste. This effect wore off in about 18/24 months but I extended the life of the laptop with very little investments which was important for me.
You only need to repaste if you run the laptop at full throttle or is running 24/7 for 5-10 years non stop. Fan cleaning OS, RAM, SSD at 20% free space, light weight browser, GPU boost helps it run better
Its not that much about performance, than its about reducing overheating and improving cooling, which if done right can deliver even more performance with newer models with chassis from aluminum. Basically any type of copper cooler or piece put on heatpipe and using thermal pad or adhesive type of thermal paste connected to aluminum chassis will make a difference and will be much more worth it. Its also important to mention that older laptops r bit cursed with chips with larger dies which usually produce more heat than newer ones, so they usually require more bulkier cooling enhancements. Also u want to for sure clean the fans and heatsink from all the dust and debris which might block its colling performance.
If you're going to make videos for us, you should cover all the angles that would matter to us. Were the thermals better? Was power consumption lower? Those things matter, so if you're going to go through all that trouble, include that information in your video, or don't bother making the video in the first place!
Ouch. How can I know what "matters" to you? Personally the thermals don't interest me at all, and I don't think they should matter to about 99% of people. The question is does it perform better. That is the question I answer. This is a 10 year old laptop that is slow and almost ready for the trash. I rejuvenated it. The rest are just numbers and the possibility of some lower fan noise.
@@GaryExplains You've been doing this long enough that you should know what could matter to us... We may have (have had) an 8+ year old laptop that was performing acceptably, but was getting uncomfortably warm on our lap, and/or the fan was ramping up too often (which would shorten it's life). That information would be helpful, and the slight performance boost would just be icing on the cake. I had a 9 year old laptop that I re-pasted due to heat and fan noise, and it helped quite a lot. So much so, that I ended was confident enough to upgrade it from an i3 to an i7 a few months later. The heat and fan noise are back, but the performance is significantly improved. I'm still using that (now 12 year old) laptop, and it has no problem doing what I ask it to.
LOL. So apparently making videos turns me into a mind reader and I was meant to know that you had a laptop that was warm on your lap. I thought I was making videos about what I was doing and about what MY laptop did, not yours. Next you will tell me that I should have included a section about clearing crumbs from your keyboard because the keys are sticky on your laptop and I should have known that and included it in the video 😂
@@GaryExplains It doesn't take a mind reader to cover the basic benefits of re-pasting a laptop CPU. But it does, evidently, take someone better in touch with their audience than you are.
@@jgorres But the video isn't about the basics of repasting a laptop CPU. It is a video about a laptop which I rejuvenated in a previous video and then to satisfy some viewers who said I should repaste the CPU, I did it and posted my results. I don't see why that is hard to understand.
I have a Zephyrus G14 2022. Replaced the TIM with Laird TPCM7100. Gained better temps compared to stock Liquid Metal because the stock application was so bad. You can check my post on the Zephyrus G14 subreddit including before after pics and test results.
When removing the heatsink / fan assembly from the processor be careful if the processor appears to be stuck to the heatsink. Some of the thermal pads used on older machines seem to stick like glue when cold and you could end up pulling the processor out of the socket even though the locking mechanism is still shut. This happened to me and I was probably lucky not to bend any pins on the processor. The solution after this was to gently heat the processor and heatsink with a hair dryer but don't overdo it - 70 - 80 C should be fine. In future I will heat up the heatsink in situ before attempting to remove it from the cpu. (I have a multimeter with a temperature probe. Just use common sense and don't burn yourself or the cpu). As far as dust and fluff in the fan and heat exchanger assembly is concerned, remove fan, poke or blow fluff from the outside through the fan casing (blowing it from the inside won't help as this is how all of the crap got piled up against the radiator fins in the first place). Then DO NOT use the laptop in bed or on the couch or on the carpet or any fabric surface without something firm and dust-free underneath the laptop. How the hell do you think that the dust and fluff got there in the first place as the air intake on most laptops is underneath. A suitably sized food tray will do the job nicely.
I typically listen to the fans. If it's running quietly, I am not about to go through all the hassle to do all of that. If you have total confidence nothing will break and your time is worthless to you, then sure, do it every single time, it's good maintenance. For the rest of us that calculate time = money, it's only worth it if it's running warm, the fans are making strange sounds, or spinning a whole lot. That being said, I have 3 dogs. Cleaning out fans is part of monthly maintenance on all the computers in my house. I have an anti-static electronics blower because canned air just gets too expensive at that point.
From my experience its best to put Grizzly Carbonaut - Carbon Thermal Pad on CPU and GPU and only blow and vacuum laptop once a year. Good thing about carbon pad is, it newer get hard.
Changing the paste does much more on a high power gaming laptop with big heatsinks high power CPU/GPU, because they run hot most of the time have problems with thermal throttling an they suck in 10Times more air (and dust) Plus the original paste is not the best you can get.
WOW.. Magnificent Work..Tho Not Much Difference For This Chipset.. This Info Is Much Appreciated. But As You Said At The Closure Of The Video! For A Harder Working Chipset The Thermo Paste May Be Dryed Up. We Thank you, Very Much.
this only makes sense if your upgrading the cpu, wifi card. at this point its better to upgrade all together. i3 Gen 2 still run the basics. these old laptop make a good backup. Run a lighter OS, web browser, GPU assist helps
i have overheating issues on my dell latitude e 7440 laptop,some engineer suggest me to change thermal paste but am very worry about to change it coz its need to be open all genuine company setting so what can i do now? laptop specialist give me suggestion pls...
It's not mostly for performance that you should do a thermal paste replacement on old laptops and desktops, it's mostly because of the chances it dried up, which would lead to an overheating CPU, which would mean a short lifespan and/or throttling. True that it's not always the case (thermal paste drying up I mean), and if it's too hard to open the thing up and the laptop is too old, it might just not be worth it at all, but people shouldn't expect a huge jump in performance because of something like that. Jumps in performance only happens if it's a poorly built or poorly designed product, which is kinda rare these days, even for generic brands. But since we're talking about old used stuff... well, it used to be more common a decade or more ago... crap thermal paste that would harden up, or even some generic brands using thermal adhesives or stickers. If the laptop is not too old, one might consider using better thermal paste for overclocking, or edge gains, or perhaps to throttle down a noisy cooling fan... but again, law of diminishing returns. If it's gonna be too costly and too much work... I'm always for reducing eWaste though.
Do you have any statistics to show that higher temperatures lead to a shorter life span of the CPU? This laptop is 10+ years old already and following my upgrades will now be usable only for a few more years. You seem to be suggesting that the CPU would fail if I didn't replace the paste, that is quite a strong statement. I would like to see some proof.
The upshot is that you cannot polish a turd. That said, you can probably make the turd run cooler (and possibly quieter) at the same performance levels, which I would call a "win" in quality-of-life terms. If you had unlimited money, it would have been interesting to see if applying higher quality thermal paste (ie something from grizzly) made a difference but (1) that's still trying to polish a turd and (2) I suspect this 12 year old laptop is already pretty much worthless anyway. Beyond that, your only other options would be to overclock the CPU itself (but that may not be an option especially for these non-high-end models). I haven't watched your other video(s) but I'd suspect running a lightweight linux distro like Zorin OS would be the best way to get a passable experience (assuming you don't absolutely need Windows).
For a decade+ of laptop thermal paste it looks fine. Feels like it was barely used. Ptm Honeywell Phase change pad can be applied if you want to repaste once and forget about it. Personally, i went thermal grizzly carbonaut and IC diamond hc pad.
@@GaryExplains of course, dropped by 10-12c even without undervolt. It can now run at 45w for hours altogether. Though you would want to use insulation tape to cover smds if heatsink is flimsy or lacks pressure. 75c at max on both CPU and GPU. On ryzen 5875u stock thermal paste pushed to 97c now it's 65c. On battery 5875u barely pushed past 50c
@@GaryExplains i didn't run geekbench 6. For 3dmark and gaming, I'm seeing 5 to 10 fps boost and a couple hundred points increase considering the fact 6700hq and 980M is quite old.
So as I said in the video, a bigger CPU may see better improvement than my 3%. What was the FPS before? If it went from 60FPS to 65FPS then that is an 8% improvement.
On a ten year old laptop it might very well be worth it. Old thermal paste tends to "brick" itself by becoming hard and a barrier for heat instead of helping with the transfer. What you should do is check the max temperature your cpu is rated at and check it's temperature via a software like hardwareinfo64. If it reaches the max temp easily and stays there then you are most likely thermal throttling and you should replace the thermal paste along with cleaning the air vents.
@@alexandruilea915 I agree, i repaste my CPU & GPU at least every 6 months or so, not for performance but for lower temps, on a 10 y/o laptop it's most likely dried up & not dissipating the heat effectively. Made a video yesterday repasting my GPU.
@AlexHus I am assuming that the logic is that high temps lead to thermal throttling. But as I show in this video a) on a 10 year old laptop the paste wasn't dried up. b) the new paste didn't alter the thermal throttle or peak performance much. It seems to me that some people are obsessed with the whole thermal paste thing (judging by the number of videos on TH-cam) but having done it, I just don't see the need.
@@GaryExplains it depends on the laptop as well. On a MacBook Pro that I've changed the paste onto it was so dried that it came apart in bits like a shattered rock. The main difference is the temperature the paste has been subjected at for the duration of the usage. In other words, a gaming or high power CPU laptop (H series usually or anything with higher wattage than a model with a name terminating in U which is usually 15W or under) has higher chances for the paste to dry up.
Gary, bad news, take that laptop apart again , remove the huge volumes of paste that you put on and then apply a thin layer of paste spread really thin with a credit card. It’s. Huge mistake, that amount of paste will insulate and actually heat the cpu, the purpose of the paste is to only remove air gaps between the cooler and the cpu. It’s a very common mistake you’ve made and will shorten the life of the cpu
No, sorry, I disagree for several reasons. 1) There are plenty of videos which show that excessive paste does not hamper the heat transfer (see th-cam.com/video/5mhPRpdjf6M/w-d-xo.html for example). 2) When applying the pressure of the heat sink, the excess paste is squashed sideways making it a "thin layer". 3) It won't shorten the life of the CPU. Please provide proof of that statement. 4) I actually did remove some of the excess before proceeding, I forgot that the internet is full of people that obsess about this kind of thing. I should have edited the footage better, my bad.
I was speaking in terms of the thermal conductivity specifications of thermal paste and manufacturers best practice advice and warranty terms and conditions. I’ve seen videos too of guys assembling CPU’s into motherboards on nylon table cloths with no consideration for ESD discharge and grounding. Just because it works in a video doesn’t make it right or an authoritative source.
It's extremely important to keep track of which screw goes in which hole. If you put a long screw in a shallow hole, you may drive it through the motherboard.
In addition to thermal paste, fans are often replaceable.
Usually removing dust from the fan makes for a bigger improvement. But the difference in performance doesn't tell the whole story. Maybe the Laptop now delivers the same performance but cooler and/or with a lower fanspeed (-> quieter).
Since I am mainly interested in getting the best performance from this old laptop, making it useable in 2023, then the things like lower fan speeds aren't really what I am worried about, however I agree that could be a nice secondary effect.
@@GaryExplains removing fan dust would have helped with the best sustained performance then just best performance, using compressed air can or WD circuit cleaner , without much additional risk or work then already done
Fan dust can indeed be a problem. As I said at the beginning of the video I had several comments asking why didn't I change the thermal paste, so I wanted to satisfy the curiosity of those viewers (and my own) and see if it made any difference.
@@GaryExplains Gary, I don't mean to be a douchbag here but you could handle this better than you have. On the one hand you say you make this video to satisfy some questions we had about thermal paste, but are choosing to be defensive and say you don't care when we give constructive criticism about your testing methodology and what additional information you could have provided.
You could have handled this better by either saying nothing at all, or simply saying "ah sorry, I wanted to do this very quickly this time around, will consider if I ever do a future video about this" or something to this effect. It would at least sound a lot better than your utterly unhelpful replies that just leave us feeling politely ignored.
You are essentially saying "I don't care" but using 50 words instead of 3. Just my opinion.
I wouldn't expect a big performance difference from repasting for a lower end machine, but cleaning may make it really silent.
You'll only gain performance is it's been thermal throttling, the main purpose of a fresh thermal paste is to lower temps.
Quite surprised no test around temps were conducted before & after.
Knowing the temperature as an absolute number wouldn't really help. The question is does the performance change? Does the laptop throttle under load before changing the paste, and after. Clearly there is a difference but a small one.
@@GaryExplains I disagree. That is like saying if your old car still goes goes as fast on the freeway with a 60mph limit there's no reason to change the oil. Or that a graphics setting is useless if it doesn't increase perf in a specific situation with a CPU-bottlenecked system. The laptop might've been on brink of thermal throttling without the paste change and now runs 10c cooler which definitively would make it faster on a hot day or when running heavy tasks for many hours. Preferrably you would have a few test cases done at once. Especially if you only have only one data point (one laptop) you should collect more data of it and post it all.
P.S. Also if there's way too much thermal paste (video!) it might also eat up any gains otherwise made. The paste's idea is to form as thin as possible thermal-conducting layer as possible where still connecting the surfaces. Any extra just weakens the thermal conduction ability.
So the oil analogy doesn't really work. Sorry. My aim here was to rejuvenate an old laptop. I think too many people have jumped onto the "thermal paste bandwagon and see it as cure for everything. It isn't, read the comment by
@moabswashpot9002. As for the paste, I did remove some of that before proceeding, I forgot that the internet is full of people who obsess about this kind of thing. I should have edited the footage better. Having said that, I have watch plenty of TH-cam videos tjat show that a "excess" of paste makes no difference to the effectiveness. So, I don't see it as a problem.
@@GaryExplainsIf the CPU reaches 80c or even more, it will effect performance under load.
Cinebench is a better benchmark for testing new thermal paste. Geekbench is not long enough for a PC to hit the thermal wall, therefore it is not going to show much of a difference even if there is one.
Gary, when you reapply thermal paste you should measure TEMPERATURE not benchmarks (ideally, both). The more likely benefit is reduced temps and hence your fan(s) kicking up less, resulting in less noise. If your CPU was throttled before because you were hitting a temperature threshold (such as 100c on the older Intel Macbooks), you might get boosted performance, especially for prolonged workloads, as it would have to throttle less, or not at all. Wish you included before and after CPU temperatures and ran more tests in general.
Still, I understand this was a very quick experiment, still appreciate the info. Just wish it was a bit more thorough, as your speculation on benefits is as good as anyone else's.
I am not interested in noise. I am interested in performance. This is a 10 year old laptop is now just about useable due to the rejuvenation I have done. Temp is just a statistic.
The issue is not a performance increase, it's whether the system shuts down unexpectedly when under heavy load due to overtemp. I have an older HP notebook (13 years) that is doing this on a regular basis. If I don't push it too hard and monitor the CPU temperature with the free utility Core-Temp, I'm good to go. However, if I push the system with too many Chrome tabs and play full screen video, I can watch the CPU temp rise until it shuts itself down (without warning). Not Nice. I have not taken the time yet to disassemble and replace the thermal paste since as you point out it is a fairly complex and fiddly job. I have taken the bottom cover off and blown out the dust in the fan, etc. That helped a little, but did not fix the whole problem. I am presuming the thermal paste on the CPU is the issue. It would have been nice if you established a baseline with Core-Temp on your system with varying loads, then compared the actual CPU temps after the thermal paste replacement, to see if that resulted in better headroom for the cooling system. Otherwise, great video warning about the pitfalls of notebook disassembly, and sources of teardown examples.
I guess I wasn't interested in temperature numbers, I wanted to see if it boosted performance. I don't have the shutdown issues you are describing.
@@GaryExplains I recently serviced a friend's Dell laptop (Broadwell era i3 or i5 I think) - it never crashed, but he was reporting it as being very slow. I was expecting to find the heat exchanger fins and/or the fan to be entirely blocked with dust. To my surprise the fan was utterly pristine, without a spec of dust - I suspect the fan had been faulty as fitted in the factory, and had never rotated from new. Once a new fan was fitted, he reported it as being "many times faster". I was surprised that thermal throttling was sufficient to stop this machine from reaching the CPU's emergency shut-down temperature, but apparently it was!
Indeed thermal throttling can be a big issue and a broken fan is going to do that. However with a clean, working fan and thermal paste that wasn't dried completely, changing the paste did little for my laptop.
@@GaryExplains You know that if your CPU temperature is consistently high your performance can drop drastically, this is what people are trying to say. Well if it didn't help for you, might help for others, you mentioned that your pc is 10 years old in previous comments I read, specs comes to a play, because your pc might be just outdated for most of the stuff today, if you really want a better pc buy a stationary pc, that are easy to change parts and requires less tedious work. Also I know i'm late so yeah, hope this helps.
Yes. Did it a few days ago and discovered some of the thermal paste applied by acer did not even have enough contact to the heat sink. There was atleast 3mm gaps between the heat sinks. Some thermal pads are missing.
Lucky for me i had a lot of thermal pads with different thickness. The temperature improved by atleast 5 degress Celsius.
My laptop is an acer nitro 5 2020.
When asking (and answering) a question like this, a good idea would be to show before and after temperature numbers, as the end performance alone doesnt tell the whole story. I am surprised you skipped that part, regardless of whether or not you just wanted to measure performance, the temps show us how close the CPU is to thermal throttling threshold after re-pasting. Also, most people replace paste in a laptop to improve thermals and reduce throttling situations and not because of performance (this is a nice side bonus).
The end performance is all that interests me, the rest are just statistics.
@@GaryExplains I got from other comments that performance is all that interests *you* , but the thumbnail and title have "should YOU replace" and "YOUR laptop", which imo deserves a more broader answer than "performance is all that interests me".
Also thermals are more than just statistics.
@@DavorBa Assuming there is no thermal throttling, what is the benefit of knowing the numbers?
@@GaryExplains Because lower number translates into battery health. Its also a nice to know if something you have done for the past 20-30 minutes has lowered the working temperature of the laptop you maybe using every day. It shows how much leeway your CPU has before hitting that thermal threshold. Its overall a nice complimentary info to performance numbers.
@@DavorBa Exactly it is just info... As I said, statistics.
I have found that often times re-pasting and cleaning out the dust in the sink don’t actually greatly improve performance. Instead, it will typically lower fan noise. Because the system no longer has to work as hard. To achieve the same level of cooling.
Thanks, I use a Thinkpad P52 for heavy duty workloads
Recently I added ram and a second ssd
I updated the Wi-Fi card as well
I was considering disassembling the whole machine to change the thermal paste but I think I will pass
Perhaps it's better to check beforehand if a device is thermal throttling or running excessively hot and doing some performance tests and then deciding whether or not to take it apart and change the thermal paste, clean the fans and so on...
I only did it to satisfy some of my viewers who insisted that it was a necessary step.
@@GaryExplains Thanks for the video, it was informative. I can agree somewhat with the viewers as back in my country (warm climate) the CPU thermal paste and dust are one of the biggest problems with old laptops.
for me it wasn't performance I was after, I wanted a cooler CPU and I did, lowered it by 8C when watching videos which I mostly use it for.
The cooler it is, the longer it will last.
Interesting. Is there any evidence that a cooler CPU will last longer? I have never had a CPU fail, ever.
Don't know really but it sounds logical.
Also impossible to test.
@@AliensInc. Ok. But, it doesn't sound logical to me. I don't know of any negative impact on the internals of a CPU due to heat, assuming the heat level is within the tolerances stated by the manufacturer. 🤷♂️
OK, then why not run it at 5-10C lower than spec and see also why does we even need paste then cos with the cooler tight on it won't go over spec but with def. higher temp.
Also, many years ago I saw statistics about CPUs runnimg at 80C would brake sooner than running at 60.
Good to know, that will save me a lot of headache. Thank you for showing!
The performance may not be what makes this effort worthwhile. As you point out, the extra thermal transfer should keep it within thermal limits on hot days.
The other thing that can be done is to use very high thermal transfer paste, just to get the best benefit that you can from all the work. 🙂
Replacing the thermal paste stopped my laptop from crashing all the time due overheating. It's important to clean the fan and also replacing thermal paste after 3 or 5 years.
But this laptop was 10 years old and wasn't crashing and changing the paste didn't improve the performance much.
I think it depends on the machine, mine is a Vaio from 2011 with Radeon Graphics, every time I started intensive work like light gaming or converting files to MP4 or other formats, it crashed. The thermal paste was gone after 8 years when I decided to open it. After replacing it, the crashing stopped, and the fan did not go at Maximo speed when in IDLE. @@GaryExplains
Yes it depends on the machine, which I guess was the point I was making. You said it was important to replace the paste and I think some people take that literally and get anxious if they haven't replaced the paste in a couple of years.
Could you recommend the brand name of the thermal paste you applied?... Thanks.
I changed the thermal paste on my 2020 HP Envy with a Ryzen 4700U that runs hot (up to 100C)stock so by adding aftermarket paste I managed to cool it down by a good 10 degrees at least.
Did it improve the performance?
@@GaryExplains it did by a small margin but only because it no longer throttled under heavy CPU load.
I have an old Dell laptop that was overheating. It turnrd out tte heatpipes had failed - replacing them and paste at the same time made a huge difference to the gam speed and CPU temperature.
Obviously if the laptop has a defect (broken pipes or a broken fan) then it needs a repair.
how do you not talk about temperatures or fan noise ? ...
Why should I talk about temperature, it is just a statistic. I am interested in performance.
Looks like the CPU is changeable too.
I have an old Acer 8930G, currently has a Core 2 Duo T6400 but I've bought a Core 2 Quad Q9000 for it :)
I de-dusted my laptop and replaced the thermal paste and oh my… it’s literally totally silent at idle and at max a slight humming sound while gaming. Before that, fans were spinning at idle and while gaming my laptop felt like an oven and the fans were spinning so fast it felt like it was almost gonna take-off.
If only labtops had a 2.5 drive bay and least 1 nvme slot as a standard.
A SATA SSD would have already helped reduce internal temps compared to design spec so thermally better starting point already.
Repasting, reseating and a clean does no harm on any machine and reduces potential issues due to thernal creep and other contact issues.
2% is a win.
Taking it apart can do lots of harm, especially if you aren't experienced. So not really a win-win.
My ASUS RoG's (intel i7 10th gen, gtx 1650 ti) CPU and GPU temperatures started hitting 80-90+ while on idle, mostly due to my attempts to crypto mine on it, which permanently reduced performance on it (noticeable while gaming). After realizing it wasn't worth mining, I decided to put thermal paste in the laptop. Straight away the temps came back to a normal 40-60C, though it still doesn't feel as fast as before sadly.
Whis is the best way to measure temperature of the CPU?... Thanks.
What about thermals?
What about them? My concern is performance, thermal numbers are just statistics.
@@GaryExplains i mean yeah performance is not really a big difference but it would be interesting if new thermalpast does improve thermals by a lot if performance is almost identical?!
@@GaryExplains It would be interesting to see the temperature at the same load before and after applying the new paste.
@@casualcomputing Interesting maybe, but not actually useful.
I was also considering doing the same but was reluctant because of the effort involved. My laptop is having 3rd gen ryzen 5 processor and it often spikes to 90-95 degrees. I'm curious if it results in any temperature difference even if it doesn't improve the performance. 🤔
I have done revamps on 3 different laptops and the results always differed. I would say SSD change + RAM boost will have a clear improvement for sure. The thermal paste change would probably depend on the processor size more than anything. My Asus z14 laptop barely showed any change after changing the paste, probably 5 degress C decrease in temp but my gaming laptop showed a clear improvement dropping almost 25 degrees directly after changing the paste. This effect wore off in about 18/24 months but I extended the life of the laptop with very little investments which was important for me.
You only need to repaste if you run the laptop at full throttle or is running 24/7 for 5-10 years non stop.
Fan cleaning OS, RAM, SSD at 20% free space, light weight browser, GPU boost helps it run better
Its not that much about performance, than its about reducing overheating and improving cooling, which if done right can deliver even more performance with newer models with chassis from aluminum. Basically any type of copper cooler or piece put on heatpipe and using thermal pad or adhesive type of thermal paste connected to aluminum chassis will make a difference and will be much more worth it.
Its also important to mention that older laptops r bit cursed with chips with larger dies which usually produce more heat than newer ones, so they usually require more bulkier cooling enhancements.
Also u want to for sure clean the fans and heatsink from all the dust and debris which might block its colling performance.
For me it is all about performance. This is about an old laptop which I rejuvenated and I want the performance so that it works okay in 2023.
If you're going to make videos for us, you should cover all the angles that would matter to us. Were the thermals better? Was power consumption lower? Those things matter, so if you're going to go through all that trouble, include that information in your video, or don't bother making the video in the first place!
Ouch. How can I know what "matters" to you? Personally the thermals don't interest me at all, and I don't think they should matter to about 99% of people. The question is does it perform better. That is the question I answer. This is a 10 year old laptop that is slow and almost ready for the trash. I rejuvenated it. The rest are just numbers and the possibility of some lower fan noise.
@@GaryExplains You've been doing this long enough that you should know what could matter to us... We may have (have had) an 8+ year old laptop that was performing acceptably, but was getting uncomfortably warm on our lap, and/or the fan was ramping up too often (which would shorten it's life). That information would be helpful, and the slight performance boost would just be icing on the cake. I had a 9 year old laptop that I re-pasted due to heat and fan noise, and it helped quite a lot. So much so, that I ended was confident enough to upgrade it from an i3 to an i7 a few months later. The heat and fan noise are back, but the performance is significantly improved. I'm still using that (now 12 year old) laptop, and it has no problem doing what I ask it to.
LOL. So apparently making videos turns me into a mind reader and I was meant to know that you had a laptop that was warm on your lap. I thought I was making videos about what I was doing and about what MY laptop did, not yours. Next you will tell me that I should have included a section about clearing crumbs from your keyboard because the keys are sticky on your laptop and I should have known that and included it in the video 😂
@@GaryExplains It doesn't take a mind reader to cover the basic benefits of re-pasting a laptop CPU. But it does, evidently, take someone better in touch with their audience than you are.
@@jgorres But the video isn't about the basics of repasting a laptop CPU. It is a video about a laptop which I rejuvenated in a previous video and then to satisfy some viewers who said I should repaste the CPU, I did it and posted my results. I don't see why that is hard to understand.
I have a Zephyrus G14 2022. Replaced the TIM with Laird TPCM7100. Gained better temps compared to stock Liquid Metal because the stock application was so bad. You can check my post on the Zephyrus G14 subreddit including before after pics and test results.
When removing the heatsink / fan assembly from the processor be careful if the processor appears to be stuck to the heatsink. Some of the thermal pads used on older machines seem to stick like glue when cold and you could end up pulling the processor out of the socket even though the locking mechanism is still shut.
This happened to me and I was probably lucky not to bend any pins on the processor. The solution after this was to gently heat the processor and heatsink with a hair dryer but don't overdo it - 70 - 80 C should be fine. In future I will heat up the heatsink in situ before attempting to remove it from the cpu. (I have a multimeter with a temperature probe. Just use common sense and don't burn yourself or the cpu).
As far as dust and fluff in the fan and heat exchanger assembly is concerned, remove fan, poke or blow fluff from the outside through the fan casing (blowing it from the inside won't help as this is how all of the crap got piled up against the radiator fins in the first place).
Then DO NOT use the laptop in bed or on the couch or on the carpet or any fabric surface without something firm and dust-free underneath the laptop. How the hell do you think that the dust and fluff got there in the first place as the air intake on most laptops is underneath. A suitably sized food tray will do the job nicely.
Any change in fan speeds or thermals (e.g., skin touch)?
I typically listen to the fans. If it's running quietly, I am not about to go through all the hassle to do all of that. If you have total confidence nothing will break and your time is worthless to you, then sure, do it every single time, it's good maintenance. For the rest of us that calculate time = money, it's only worth it if it's running warm, the fans are making strange sounds, or spinning a whole lot. That being said, I have 3 dogs. Cleaning out fans is part of monthly maintenance on all the computers in my house. I have an anti-static electronics blower because canned air just gets too expensive at that point.
From my experience its best to put Grizzly Carbonaut - Carbon Thermal Pad on CPU and GPU and only blow and vacuum laptop once a year. Good thing about carbon pad is, it newer get hard.
Changing the paste does much more on a high power gaming laptop with big heatsinks high power CPU/GPU, because they run hot most of the time have problems with thermal throttling an they suck in 10Times more air (and dust) Plus the original paste is not the best you can get.
I wonder I I should change thermal pads too If I change thermal paste?
WOW.. Magnificent Work..Tho Not Much Difference For This Chipset.. This Info Is Much Appreciated. But As You Said At The Closure Of The Video! For A Harder Working Chipset The Thermo Paste May Be Dryed Up. We Thank you, Very Much.
Glad it helped
this only makes sense if your upgrading the cpu, wifi card.
at this point its better to upgrade all together. i3 Gen 2 still run the basics.
these old laptop make a good backup.
Run a lighter OS, web browser, GPU assist helps
i have overheating issues on my dell latitude e 7440 laptop,some engineer suggest me to change thermal paste but am very worry about to change it coz its need to be open all genuine company setting so what can i do now? laptop specialist give me suggestion pls...
Was lucky my laptop has very accessible heatsink! Just 10 screws on the bottom and 3 more on the heatsink.
Instead of buying some random computer store paste, something properly performant and long lasting, such as Arctic MX-4 could have been used tbh...
It's not mostly for performance that you should do a thermal paste replacement on old laptops and desktops, it's mostly because of the chances it dried up, which would lead to an overheating CPU, which would mean a short lifespan and/or throttling.
True that it's not always the case (thermal paste drying up I mean), and if it's too hard to open the thing up and the laptop is too old, it might just not be worth it at all, but people shouldn't expect a huge jump in performance because of something like that.
Jumps in performance only happens if it's a poorly built or poorly designed product, which is kinda rare these days, even for generic brands. But since we're talking about old used stuff... well, it used to be more common a decade or more ago... crap thermal paste that would harden up, or even some generic brands using thermal adhesives or stickers.
If the laptop is not too old, one might consider using better thermal paste for overclocking, or edge gains, or perhaps to throttle down a noisy cooling fan... but again, law of diminishing returns. If it's gonna be too costly and too much work...
I'm always for reducing eWaste though.
Do you have any statistics to show that higher temperatures lead to a shorter life span of the CPU? This laptop is 10+ years old already and following my upgrades will now be usable only for a few more years. You seem to be suggesting that the CPU would fail if I didn't replace the paste, that is quite a strong statement. I would like to see some proof.
The upshot is that you cannot polish a turd. That said, you can probably make the turd run cooler (and possibly quieter) at the same performance levels, which I would call a "win" in quality-of-life terms.
If you had unlimited money, it would have been interesting to see if applying higher quality thermal paste (ie something from grizzly) made a difference but (1) that's still trying to polish a turd and (2) I suspect this 12 year old laptop is already pretty much worthless anyway. Beyond that, your only other options would be to overclock the CPU itself (but that may not be an option especially for these non-high-end models).
I haven't watched your other video(s) but I'd suspect running a lightweight linux distro like Zorin OS would be the best way to get a passable experience (assuming you don't absolutely need Windows).
For a decade+ of laptop thermal paste it looks fine. Feels like it was barely used. Ptm Honeywell Phase change pad can be applied if you want to repaste once and forget about it. Personally, i went thermal grizzly carbonaut and IC diamond hc pad.
Did it improve the performance?
@@GaryExplains of course, dropped by 10-12c even without undervolt. It can now run at 45w for hours altogether. Though you would want to use insulation tape to cover smds if heatsink is flimsy or lacks pressure. 75c at max on both CPU and GPU. On ryzen 5875u stock thermal paste pushed to 97c now it's 65c. On battery 5875u barely pushed past 50c
@@vasudevmenon2496 I didn't ask if it changed the temperature, I asked if it increased the performance.
@@GaryExplains i didn't run geekbench 6. For 3dmark and gaming, I'm seeing 5 to 10 fps boost and a couple hundred points increase considering the fact 6700hq and 980M is quite old.
So as I said in the video, a bigger CPU may see better improvement than my 3%. What was the FPS before? If it went from 60FPS to 65FPS then that is an 8% improvement.
should make a video vs a smoker user, I think I have to change it more often since I smoke around my laptop 420
should I use alcohol for removing/cleaning old thermal paste before applying new?
yes, 95% alcohol or more.
Yeah, not much of a case for all the haste to change the paste.
You can also learn how to open laptops
And break a few along the way. 😬
A new toothbrush works great to remove old thermal past from the CPU and cooling pad.
I dunno how to change thermal paste in my 10 year old HP laptop so that's why I put it under a laptop cooler pad. Good to know that it's not worth it.
On a ten year old laptop it might very well be worth it. Old thermal paste tends to "brick" itself by becoming hard and a barrier for heat instead of helping with the transfer. What you should do is check the max temperature your cpu is rated at and check it's temperature via a software like hardwareinfo64. If it reaches the max temp easily and stays there then you are most likely thermal throttling and you should replace the thermal paste along with cleaning the air vents.
Which is the opposite of what I found and showed in this video! 🤷♂️
@@alexandruilea915 I agree, i repaste my CPU & GPU at least every 6 months or so, not for performance but for lower temps, on a 10 y/o laptop it's most likely dried up & not dissipating the heat effectively. Made a video yesterday repasting my GPU.
@AlexHus I am assuming that the logic is that high temps lead to thermal throttling. But as I show in this video a) on a 10 year old laptop the paste wasn't dried up. b) the new paste didn't alter the thermal throttle or peak performance much. It seems to me that some people are obsessed with the whole thermal paste thing (judging by the number of videos on TH-cam) but having done it, I just don't see the need.
@@GaryExplains it depends on the laptop as well. On a MacBook Pro that I've changed the paste onto it was so dried that it came apart in bits like a shattered rock. The main difference is the temperature the paste has been subjected at for the duration of the usage. In other words, a gaming or high power CPU laptop (H series usually or anything with higher wattage than a model with a name terminating in U which is usually 15W or under) has higher chances for the paste to dry up.
Gary, bad news, take that laptop apart again , remove the huge volumes of paste that you put on and then apply a thin layer of paste spread really thin with a credit card. It’s. Huge mistake, that amount of paste will insulate and actually heat the cpu, the purpose of the paste is to only remove air gaps between the cooler and the cpu. It’s a very common mistake you’ve made and will shorten the life of the cpu
No, sorry, I disagree for several reasons. 1) There are plenty of videos which show that excessive paste does not hamper the heat transfer (see th-cam.com/video/5mhPRpdjf6M/w-d-xo.html for example). 2) When applying the pressure of the heat sink, the excess paste is squashed sideways making it a "thin layer". 3) It won't shorten the life of the CPU. Please provide proof of that statement. 4) I actually did remove some of the excess before proceeding, I forgot that the internet is full of people that obsess about this kind of thing. I should have edited the footage better, my bad.
I was speaking in terms of the thermal conductivity specifications of thermal paste and manufacturers best practice advice and warranty terms and conditions.
I’ve seen videos too of guys assembling CPU’s into motherboards on nylon table cloths with no consideration for ESD discharge and grounding. Just because it works in a video doesn’t make it right or an authoritative source.
@@eveningecho5334 Try watching the video before you dismiss the findings.