Is the best thermal paste pattern a blob? A line? Or perhaps the Half-Life logo?
Which thermal paste pattern is best? This is a hotly-debated question that I’m sure most PC builders have an opinion on. Personally, I’m a line guy, especially with the introduction of Intel’s long LGA 1700 chips. But there’s also the blob, the X, the circle, and many more you could probably make a decent argument for.
What about the Discord logo? Or a smiley face? Or the Half-Life logo? That’s what Tiktok account MrYeester is attempting to prove with his latest round of PC experimentation, which includes seeing which known-brand logo is best for keeping your chip cool.
The best thermal paste pattern is all about coverage. You want to squish your cooler onto your chip and in doing so spread the thermal paste around to cover the chip’s heat spreader in its entirety. To mimic this process, MyYeester has been trying out various thermal paste patterns and then squishing them down using a piece of glass, so we can see the end result.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, lathering the Discord logo onto your chip offers a relatively decent coverage of the chip. Though admittedly the lower portion of his AMD AM4 processor wasn’t properly covered in the end. The more surprising and likely useful testing was comparing the square and circle patterns, which showed that neither really covered the centre of your chip. That’s probably the worst-case scenario, as the centre tends to be a hotspot for silicon.
I guess what it comes down to is time versus effectiveness, and let’s be honest MrYeester was liberally lathering thermal paste for some of these designs. If you put half a tube of paste on your chip I’m sure it’ll get good coverage no matter what pattern you go with.
(Image credit: Cooler Master, EKWB)
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But it’s another fun ‘what if?’ from the channel, which I first discovered back when he attempted to connect as many RAM sticks using risers as his system would allow. He managed a leaning tower of five RAM sticks, by the way. And of course it made the PC absolutely worse in many ways.
The channel also once used a car tyre to apply thermal paste to a CPU. On the one hand, the CPU has thermal paste on it now. Yippee. On the other hand, it probably doesn’t need it anymore.
If you’re in need of actual thermal paste advice, generally it’s better to have too much than too little. If you’re a bit more generous with your paste, you’ll probably be okay whichever way you apply it (within reason). Generally a line or X in the middle of your chip will suffice for most, and if it’s a longer chip like Intel’s 12th or 13th Gen, make sure to stretch your pattern out a little further to ensure full coverage.
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