Kane Zhang
Let me preface this whole things by saying that Kryonaut is a really good thermal paste for cpus. It helped decrease my tdie temps by a massive margin (over 5 degrees), and thermal conductivity is impressive while being easy to apply. But putting it on gpus... let's just say I bought this before I had actually done proper research because I had heard so much good about it. *sigh* time for the long boring essay...
**TL;DR: pump out is bad for long term thermals and this has especially bad pump out. anything with IHS (cpu) gooood, anything without (delidded cpu, gpu, socs, laptops, etc.) baaad
A lot of people tend to think thermal paste is either all the same or only look at conductivity. However, with this paste, I figured out the hard way that thermal paste is way more than heat dissapation. Pump out occurs through many repeated cycles of rapid heating and cooling and causes the thermal paste to dissipate outwards and leave little to no paste on the core, usually through a long time period (3-10 years, depending on quality). This is more prominent on gpus as those have no ihs and tend to heat and cool more violently than cpus do. Thicker, more viscous thermal pastes are less prone to this. Unfortunately, this thermal paste in particular has especially terrible pump out because it's thin and watery.
It worked WONDERS on my cpu as I mentioned earlier. An already great temp of 65c or so fell to 55-60 while gaming in ambient 22-27c. No pump out issues and it stayed like this until I changed coolers.
On my gpu, it worked well - at first. 55c with 8 degree delta between hot spot and core. It almost instantly (within a month or two) started to have bad deltas (meaning pump out was causing die to heat up in certain spots more than others). Delta was around 8c, then slowly rose to 15c+ (worst I saw was 20c) and core temp also rose from 55c to 60c to 65c. When I replaced it with a thicker, much more resiliant thermal paste (thermalright tfx), it has been consistently good at ~57-61c and 10-12c delta for the past 3 months.
All in all, it's a great paste that has amazing thermal conductivity (although that standard is nonexistent). your cpu temps will drop if you are replacing old or otherwise low quality thermal paste. However, it's a lot of money for the amount of paste you get, and being the way it is, it is not designed for direct die contact, so bear that in mind. Be aware that different thermal pastes have different use cases, and this is not for gpus. If you want that from thermal grizzly, there is hydronaut and liquid metal (though I have not used either). I personally just recommend arctic mx5 and tfx and maybe noctua nt-h2.
| Product Dimensions | 25.2 x 25.2 x 7.6 inches |
|---|---|
| Item Weight | 0.035 ounces |
| Manufacturer | ZyXel |
| ASIN | B011F7W3LU |
| Item model number | TG-K-001-RS |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Date First Available | July 14, 2015 |
Chris
IDMooseMan