Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “More FPS for just $10 – K5 Pro Viscous Thermal Paste”.
For just $ 10, this tub of goop can give you more FPS, or at least it can, according to Computer Systems, who made it. To put their claims to the test. We’Re gon na be removing the stock thermal pads from an X17 and a 3090 applying this goop and reassembling it all to see how much improvement we can get.. Is it worth what I’m sure it will be a huge mess? I don’t know, but I am sure I want to tell you about our sponsor.
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( bouncy electronic music ). There are kind of two types of weird thermal things that we find.. The first is someone realizes, gamers have a lot of money and they want that. Money.
And the second is someone has a use case in industry and they find it after the fact. It’S good for gamers.. This, fortunately, is in the later group. – K5-PRO came about because the founders were just working at a computer repair shop.. They were having a lot of issues with devices coming back to them and they realized that a lot of the time the problems were just old, worn out thermal pads.. A thermal pad is a specific thickness like this.
One right here is one millimeter., So they would have to go in measure it and if you get it wrong, your device overheats and it dies. Now it just so happens that they also were working at a university.. So they did the thing you do when you work in a university. The result of all of their R and D.
Is this right here K5-PRO., It’s a goop instead of a pad, so they can just slop it in. And apparently it’s way more conductive than a thermal pad as well and can have performance gains in like something like this right here.. Our test today is pretty simple.. First, we’re going to just run them stock find out baseline numbers, then replace a thermal paste with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.
From there we’re gon na tear it apart. Again. Replace the thermal pads with K5-PRO and Kryonaut to find out basically the maximum performance of these things with their current coolers.
We’re going to use FurMark, F1, 2020 and 3DMark to hopefully give us a good range of stuff. And I’m gon na go eat some lunch And see you in 15, minutes. First round of tests are nearly done laptops.
All good. GPU still needs to run 3DMark once, but then we’re totally good.. We can look at our results. Here.
The longer the FurMark goes, the GPU just slowly gets slower and slower and slower. Are you excited for tearing this laptop apart, [ David ] Yeah.. Now I was a bit of a dumdum and decided to use the Alienware X17. And, like I want do that, because it’s really fast and I like it as a laptop, but doing this was really stupid because the disassembly process – it’s not easy.. This is not a simple laptop to take apart. Good job Alex smart thinking..
Everything that you need like SSDs battery RAM is all pretty easy to access. Cooler, not so much it’s on the other side of this.. Do you like taking laptops apart David [, David ]? Not even a little bit., Not even a little. [ David ], I hate it., Batter first.
People always get really mad at me. When I don’t do that., You might be wondering given how much of a pain in the ass this is to disassemble. Why I choose to use it.? The main reason is that most of our other really fast, laptops are from ASUS and ASUS uses thermal paste on their VRMs instead of thermal pads, which means switching it to K5-PRO, isn’t really gon na give you much of a benefit.. What do you think the chances are that there’s a random cable on the bottom that I need to disconnect David [ David ], Pretty good.
Wow okay. Wow, that’s a lot of cooling. 17 CPU Perrier..
So it looks like that we have liquid metal on the CPU, but the GPU is just regular everyday thermal paste.. So do we replace the liquid metal David Kind of feel like we should. [, David ]? Okay, you do it.
Spread around liquid metal. You piece of crap.: Now we just have to put it back together and hope it all works.. Here we go. Way to go a little bit of liquid metal on there.
[ David ], But that makes it go faster right, Yeah., Perfect. She works good.. Now we get to take apart a GPU.. Oh, I really hope that ASUS made this easy to disassemble.
With them. It’S normally kind of a toss up with the GPUs.. While we take apart the GPU, let’s get, the laptop on the go. Initial looks seems very close to stock..
Oh, these are the guys, where we’ll probably get a lot of benefit from it. Getting replaced.. This screw is basically stripped from the factory.. That’S gon na make getting it back in a joy..
Oh I hate doing this so much., Oh no ugh.. One thing that’s worth noting is that on cards, and particularly motherboards, the really high end models with really high end VRMs might benefit less from K5-PRO than a lower end model, because these right here are probably very efficient and kept quite cool by all of this heat. Sink. All right, GPU repaste was a success.
Laptop, also looks like it’s doing pretty good. Yeah, it’s not even thermal throttling on the CPU.. So I guess our liquid metaling is better than Alienware’s.. See you in another 30 minutes..
My first impressions are: it’s pretty much margin of error between the two thermal pastes.. I mean Dell did a great job and so did ASUS.. I’M not super surprised, given that these are incredibly high, end devices.. Now the fun begins and off the second time.. The cooler comes off., Get rid of these stupid little thermal pads., One millimeter up to about three millimeters. It still is a good.
Above that. What you want to do is have like a paste, copper, shim and then paste again. Yeah thermodynamics is frigging weird., I’m going to start just applying this as we go.. You cannot really have too much..
Oh, this is making a mess., Although that’s a good thing.. If you have too much of it, it’s going to squish out and you’ll be fine.. If you don’t have enough of it, they’ll have an air gap and your components are going to overheat and die.. The other benefit is that it can actually stop condensation from forming..
Now, why should this stuff be better than a thermal pad? This copper, although it may look fairly smooth on a microscopic level, there’s a whole bunch of little hills and valleys and crap., And that’s what your thermal interface needs to get rid of. A thermal pad gets you about 60 % contact on the surface., Whereas the K5-PRO Is able to fill in 99 % of all of those hills and valleys. [ Linus ]? Oh my God., Beautiful! Isn’T it One thing you might be wondering looking at this is how do you get rid of it? When I asked Computer Systems about it, they were kind of like “. Why would you ?” ( laughter ) It just works., It’s incredibly stable? Why would you ever replace it? But apparently, if you just soak it in alcohol for a bit, you can wipe it off and it’s not too bad.
How much squished you expect David Yeah, I’m hoping for a lot of squish.. Oh a bit of smoosh there. We’re just protecting our components.. I was expecting this to be way: grosser looking., We used under a tub of the stuff for the laptop., Given we have a bunch of two millimeter ones on here.
We’Re gon na need quite a bit for this GPU.. It’S so goopy, oh geez.. I will not let you down Computer Systems.. It is really important on chips like this, that you cover the entire thing, because there probably isn’t much temperature sensing besides, maybe a single probe in this..
So if you miss half of it, it might overheat and not even know that it’s overheating and kill itself.. They can’t say I didn’t use enough. Tub number three.. Oh I’m having a lot of fun, but this may be disturbing to some viewers.. Where would you rank this on, like the tech gore you’ve seen David [, David ], 6 out of 10.? Now what we have to do is run the tests.. This is going to be a bit more involved, figuring out if it worked or not, because it isn’t a simple look at temperature.
It good. It’s more like. I have to go through all the frame times, organize it and then we’ll be able to tell you if it worked or not. All right.
It’S the next morning and I’ve crunched the numbers. On the RTX 3090. The results are very clear.. The repaste got us more FPS, 17, more actually in FurMark., And the K5-PRO got us an additional four FPS for a total gain of 21.. This translates into a 6.3 increase in FPS. And I’ve seen a lot of people go to a lot trouble than this.
For less gains really. In F1 2020, it’s a CPU bound game, so there was no change.. As for the Alienware X17, if you want to repaste it don’t., It turns out they’re extra special element: 31, that they talked about a whole bunch.
Yeah. It kicks ass.. So when we replaced it, our performance dropped by seven FPS in FurMark.
And in F1 2021 we lost three FPS.. Fortunately, we were able to make up some of that by adding the K5-PRO., So our losses were halved in FurMark and an F1 2021. We saw an incredible gain of one FPS., Meaning that having your VRMs, better cooled on, these laptops can make up for worst CPU temperatures.. So am I going to put K5-PRO on everything? Well, the impressive part of this is that the K5-PRO was able to give us performance gains in brand new devices and brand new thermal pads..
If your laptop or GPU is around two or three years old and you’re, already planning a repaste, I think, including a tub of this stuff, makes a lot of sense., I’m probably gon na order a bulk jar. So I don’t have to use the stupid thermal pads that come with water blocks and cut them and stuff. Also applying it’s pretty fun. I like the dirtiness of it., Thanks FreshBooks for sponsoring today’s video. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that helps you. Do your business., You can impress your clients with professional. Looking invoices that detail the work, you’ve done., You can use automated payment reminders. If invoices get past due., You can easily track expenses and use their time tracker to log every minute of billable hours.
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That’S right for you and start your free trial of FreshBooks for 30 days, today., No credit card required at freshbooks.com/linus.. If you enjoyed watching this video, maybe you watch the one where we water cooled, the Area-51m. That was brutal .