Overheard a guy at Micro Center tell his friend that thermal paste is a scam

I was grabbing a new SSD last Saturday at the Micro Center in Cambridge and this dude in the aisle next to me was dead serious telling his buddy that thermal paste is just something companies made up to sell more tubes. Said he's been running his i7 for 2 years without any and it's 'fine'. I wanted to say something but just couldn't. Has anyone else run into customers or random people with hot takes like this that make you question everything?

2 comments

2 Comments

price.tara13d ago

Is it really that serious though? Thermal paste makes a difference on paper but honestly the stock paste on most coolers is already there and if you're not overclocking or pushing heavy loads you might not even notice. Still, running a chip for 2 years without any seems like a gamble for absolutely no reason lol.

kim19113d ago

Wait so he's telling someone thermal paste is a scam while standing in Micro Center, the place where literally every boxed CPU comes with a tube or a pre-applied square of the stuff? That takes some serious confidence. How did he manage to install a cooler without it and not get thermal throttling or weird shutdowns in the first week? Is he just running a super old chip that doesn't push much heat, or did he somehow get lucky with a perfect flat contact surface? Because 2 years without paste on an i7 sounds like either a miracle or a lot of background noise from the fans trying to keep up.