That whole 'never use thermal paste you found in a drawer' thing is way overblown

I was at a shop in Denver last month and overheard a kid say he'd rather buy new paste than use a tube that's been open for 6 months. I've been using the same Arctic Silver tube from 2019 on customer builds and it works fine every time. The only real problem is if it's dried out or contaminated, not just old. I test every application with a temp monitor and my numbers are always within 2 degrees of fresh paste. Has anyone actually had a failure from using old paste, or is this just a rule that got repeated too many times?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade321mo ago

Oh man, my buddy used some mystery tube he found behind his monitor and it worked fine for like a year until his PC started randomly overheating, turned out the paste had turned to basically powder in one spot.

hugo_gonzalez681mo ago

Eh I gotta disagree. I've got a tube of Arctic Silver from way before 2019 and it's still completely fine. That story about the powder sounds like dude just didn't apply it right in the first place or left the cap off for months.