matthew_hart25•24d agoTop Commenter

I thought those cheap thermal pads were fine until a PS5 repair went bad

For a long time, I figured thermal pads were all basically the same, so I'd grab whatever was cheap on Amazon. Then I got a PS5 in that kept overheating after I replaced the liquid metal. I used a budget 6 W/mK pad on the memory chips. The console would run for about 20 minutes before shutting down. A friend told me to try a known brand, so I swapped in some Gelid Solutions pads. The temperature difference on my thermal camera was over 15 degrees Celsius. That fixed the shutdown issue completely. I was totally wrong to think the cheap stuff was good enough for high heat parts. Now I keep a few quality brands on hand for consoles and GPUs. Has anyone else had a repair fail because of bad thermal material?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_logan23d ago

My old laptop taught me the same lesson with a cheap SSD that died in six months. It's crazy how many generic parts are just ticking time bombs. You really do get what you pay for with this stuff.

butler.ivan23d ago

Yeah, that "ticking time bomb" thing @the_logan said is spot on. I had a similar mess with a cheap thermal paste on a GPU. The temps looked okay at first, but after a few weeks of gaming it would start artifacting. Tore it down and the paste had basically turned to crusty chalk. Swapped it for some Arctic MX-6 and it's been solid for over a year now. It's not worth the headache to save a couple bucks on the stuff that actually moves heat.

paulschmidt17d ago

That "crusty chalk" line got me... I had a friend who used some weird off-brand paste that actually separated into oily goop and dry powder after a month. His CPU temps shot up like twenty degrees out of nowhere. Took forever to clean off, left this greasy film on the heat spreader. He learned that lesson the hard way too.