Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Yes, You Can Use Toothpaste As Thermal Paste”.
I know the idea of putting toothpaste on your expensive cpu seems like a meme, but there are definitely situations where you can find yourself. In a pinch, your system is overheating at 2am and the local 711 doesn’t stock standard, cpu, cooling supplies. Obviously. So, if you’re faced with an emergency – and you don’t have any sparrow thermal paste on hand, what can you use instead to answer it helps to understand exactly how thermal paste works when you apply thermal paste to the top of your cpu and then put your heatsink On top of it, the paste fills in microscopic cracks in both the cpu heat spreader and the bottom of the heatsink. As you apply pressure like some kind of weird cyber oreo, that would be really hard to eat and would also kill you, but damn that would taste good filling in these cracks eliminates small air gaps that can prevent heat from effectively flowing out of your processor and Into your cooler, but there’s more to a good thermal paste and to life than just filling in holes, the materials that make up the thermal base need to be thermally. Conductive or heat will have a hard time flowing through it, regardless of how well it eliminates air pockets.
Thermal paste often contains metal oxide compounds that are good at conducting heat, but not electricity. This way, they’ll cool off your cpu without posing a risk of shorting out your components. If you have a spill, there are liquid metal thermal solutions that conduct heat more effectively than metal oxide thermal paste, but unfortunately they’re also electrically conductive.
So most enthusiasts sacrifice a few degrees and just use the thermal paste since it’s safer and easier to apply, but are there easy to obtain materials that have the same properties as thermal paste? We’Ll tell you right after we thank vulture for sponsoring this video vulture provides high performance cloud servers, bare metal storage and managed kubernetes at a fraction of the cost of big tech. In less than 60 seconds. You can bring your own iso or deploy windows or linux from over 25 server locations worldwide for low latency infrastructure, wherever needed. Also, there’s vulture talon cloud gpu allowing devs to deploy fractions of virtualized nvidia a100s to handle even the most advanced workloads.
Try vulture today and receive an exclusive 30-day 150 code for new signups at the link below to answer our original question. You actually can use toothpaste in a pinch, although you probably want to mix it in with petroleum jelly like vaseline, to prevent it from drying out too quickly. But here’s the thing it’s kind of a crap shoot how well any given toothpaste will perform with your particular setup.
Some of the ingredients in toothpaste can actually be decent conductors of heat, but it’s not going to be as effective as what’s an actual thermal paste, not to mention that toothpaste contains fluoride, which has a corrosive effect great for cleaning teeth, but plaque buildup and gingivitis is Less of a problem for heat spreaders, they’re lucky another popular option – is diaper rash cream containing zinc oxide since zinc oxide is a common thermal conductor found in actual thermal paste. It’S not the worst option. If you happen to have it on hand, and it won’t dry out as quickly as many other thermal paste alternatives, but even so it won’t stay the right consistency for more than a few months, and that sounds like a long time.
But thermal paste is designed to last in your system for years before it might dry out just think about all the pre-built computers sold to folks who don’t even know what thermal paste is: they’re, probably never even going to crack open their machines, let alone experiment with Slopping hygiene products in there plus the general public, tends to hold onto their pcs for longer than enthusiasts and gamers, since they aren’t as interested in upgrading to the latest tech to play the latest aaa game. There’S a reason that putting unusual substances on cpus has largely stayed in meme territory, most commonly suggested alternatives to thermal paste tend to dry out prematurely. Surprisingly, the best alternative we tested on our sister channel linus tech tips was plain, yellow mustard of all things, but, despite the fact, it cooled our cpu off fairly. Well, it dried out by the time we finished our testing, so bottom line, any thick pasty, material that doesn’t conduct electricity could work all right if you’re having some kind of overheating emergency and need to use your pc briefly, but just get yourself some spare thermal paste. One good quality tube will have enough pace for several applications and costs less than 10 bucks. Just take it out of your monthly mustard budget, thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like hit, subscribe and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future. .