Just found out thermal paste goes bad after 3 years sitting in a drawer

I was cleaning out my workbench last week and found a tube of Arctic Silver I bought back in 2021. Figured I'd use it on a client's old gaming rig I was redoing, but when I squeezed it out it was all crusty and separated. Looked it up online and apparently the compounds break down over time even if the tube is sealed. Now I'm wondering how many builds I've done with old paste that wasn't performing right. Has anyone else had this happen with a tube that sat around too long?

2 comments

2 Comments

williamm8217d ago

Huh, I mean I guess I see the concern but is it really that big of a deal? I've got tubes of thermal paste in my drawer that are probably 5+ years old and they still squeeze out fine once you knead the tube a little. Maybe it's just me but I feel like people get way too worried about thermal paste performance. Unless you're running some extreme overclock or a super sensitive workstation, a few degrees here or there probably doesn't matter in the real world. I bet most of those past builds you did with "old" paste were still running cool enough.

rileyb6116d ago

Had a buddy who slapped some 6 year old thermal paste on his Ryzen build last year. Used it for like 8 months before his PC started shutting down under load. Opened it up and the paste had turned into basically dust, like cracked and crumbled off the CPU. He was hitting like 95C just booting into Windows by then. So yeah, maybe it works for a while if you're lucky but that stuff definitely degrades over time once you actually use it.