As a gift to my husband I repaired his very loud ps4 with this paste. I used the spatula to effectively scrape the cheap old dried up paste that Sony uses off the heat sink. Purrs like a kitten now!

I am about a week on the other side of a recent system build. Meaning that the new system has been in service for about a week. Why did I label this an under-appreciated item? Because without it the CPU probably wouldn't have lasted a minute. Ok, the truth is that if one is building on a motherboard built this century, then the board itself is probably smart enough to shut things down before the CPU cooks. But if one has built a system in the past year, then one knows just how difficult it is to get the core components at present. So, yeah, cooking the CPU would have a more profound and less recoverable connotation.

Enter, thermal paste. More specifically, enter one of the most recent formulations of thermal paste. I chose this one because it has significantly higher thermal transmission gradient than the best formulations available just a few years ago, and came in at half the price of its next competitor (at the time of purchase). In reality, they are all priced about the same, but many come with half the volume of stuff inside the tube. And suppose one makes a mistake the first time had needs a do-over (that didn't happen to me, but I prepared for it none the less). So, at about $9 for 4 ml; if this were gasoline it would cost over $170K to fill a 20 gal tank! The other guys were selling 2 ml for the same price so thankfully my car doesn't run on this stuff.

But not using it can spend about $200 to $20,000 (Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc CPU builds can start touching this magnitude of cash) in less than a minute. So far, I have stressed my system during video rendering and compositing on a few occasions - it's ok, that's what it was built to do. The CPU is factory rated at 90 degrees C - that's almost hot enough to boil water, but that is the factory established LIMIT. Using this paste along with a liquid-cooled thermal management scheme, my CPU has never gone above 61C during any operation to date including the most stressful. The thermal paste is the transmitter between the CPU and the heatsink. So no cooling strategy will be any more efficient than the paste will allow.

Another reason for purchasing a tube with extra paste; some builds use more than one CPU, and sometimes there's an options to provide additional cooling to the GPU. M.2 memory tends to run pretty warm and use heatsinks as well. The point being, anytime there's a heatsink, using thermal paste at the junction will enhance the heatsink's ability to cool the component - the better the paste, the more efficient the cooling. And cooler components run faster and smoother. Solid State memory slows down significantly at higher temperatures, it's called throttling for anyone looking at their first build. So I probably used less than 1 ml to install the CPU - it's more art than exact science, but having more left over is helpful if one has numerous heatsinks to treat during the build.

This paste emerged from the tube in a predictable manner - which is good considering the cost per ounce. It came with a mini-spatula for spreading. It sort of resembles a pizza peel if one were providing their pet hamster with its own pizza oven, but I digress. Spreading the paste prior to installing the CPU cooler was very easy and controllable. I was able to achieve edge to edge over the CPU without any dripping to the motherboard - nice, neat, mess-free application. There's also a rating for noise level....ok....um...this paste is pretty quiet. (Amazon asks reviewers to rate a few areas that are not necessarily presented in the public review space other than as an aggregate score).

My CPU was at 24C (room temperature) when I powered up this afternoon. It is now at 37C and hasn't gone above 43C during this session. That was probably during Windows boot up. It runs typically between 34C and 38C during low demand. I have read some reviews in which folks describe their systems as running nominally ay 70C! (Methinks these are gaming rigs under full load). So, I guess based on all of this, this paste is pretty effective. But it can only be as effective as the rest of the cooling system it supports. At least I can confidently say that it is not likely to be a weak link - and it has a rating for efficacy over 8 years! I would purchase it again - but I wouldn't fill the gas tank with it.

Amazing product I've been using this one about 2 months and it's made my PlayStation runs little better and make less noise the little spatula is a nice touch to the order

(shows an extreme case, results not typical)

I had an older gpu (AMD r7 450) in my 'retro pc', that would occasionally have massive performance issues, as I'm not much of a hardware guy, I figured, I'd just replace it.

But while waiting for the new GPU to arrive, I decided to do some testing, so I cranked up the settings, and found that after starting the game my gpu would jump to 80c, and it would keep climbing, after a few short mins it would reach 100c, and spike a little higher.

I'd heard replacing the thermal pate could help with heat issues, but this GPU was so cheap, and old I figured it would not be worth my time. But this paste was only $5, so I decided to give it a shot, and WOW!

My old gpu now never reaches over ~81c, and no more random slowdown, it lot quieter in use as well. (even with the stock fan!)

The fan came off easy, I cleaned the dye and metal plate, and applied the new paste, and the GPU started running good as new!

Most re-pastes won't offer this much performance, I'd argue there's not much point in re-pasting if you can stress test your gpu, without it dropping speed dramatically, or getting too close to the temp limit.

For example, I also repasted an older CPU (from a prebuilt office pc) that ran a bit hot, using some of the extra paste, and that only offered a few degrees lest, and it only got about 3-5% better performance compared to the stock.

If you're spending a bunch of time comparing a bunch of pastes online looking at the fractions of a degree difference, I'd say just go with this instead. Yes, some more expensive paste 'could' work better, but unless you have a crazy setup or custom fan, the already small performance gains this may give should be enough, an extra "0.48 degrees" likley won't matter if you're not doing crazy overclocking.

But if you know heat is your issue, and your fan is not pulling it's weight, grab some paste!

I used this on 3 computers. hence why I bought th 4g version. at first my laptop was screaming hot but after a day it returned to normal and seems to be staying cooler after the breakin period. not bad for a 6 year old laptop. I also used on my kids gaming desktop and my dads work desktop for his dental office. worked fine and gives that peace of mind that every 4-5 years these dry out and for a few bucks you can extend the life of your computer if you choose to.