Hello everyone,
Does anyone have experience with optimizing the thermal paste on the AMD model? I hear the fan regularly and have a lot of heat on the underbody - to be honest, I don’t know that from the M1 Pro. Or is my expansion stance wrong?
Best regards
Yan
I’ve ordered the Honeywell PTM7950. There is a balance to be had between getting the best performance and not having to repaste every few months when using more traditional thermal compound / liquid metal. The PTM7950 is a one time job (as long as you apply it correctly) as it lasts years rather than weeks/months.
Based on a lot of reviews I’ve seen on YouTube, it’s performance is really good (even compares to other aftermarket thermal compound). You just have to be aware that you need to let it burn in first to make phase change to liquid and back a few times to really fill the gaps. I’ve seen one or two reviews where the reviewer is applying and testing as soon as its loaded up without doing this burn in and then being disappointed.
Has anyone tried graphite sheets like the Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet?
I actually emailed them about using it but they weren’t too sure about if the mounting pressure would be enough for good results, a common laptop problem I guess.
No, but based on reviews I watched, they don’t really perform better than standard thermal paste and are just cleaner to apply/remove (and very expensive). Also they’re conductive, so dangerous. Not as dangerous as liquid metal, but still. I’d rather use PTM7950.
Hi,
I changed the thermal paste today. And because I read your posts before, I documented it to some extend.
Executive summary: Temperatures went down, noise level for balanced and full power modes in microsft windows went down, noticeable, but not much. I will try to reduce the available CPU computing power manually, if possible. We need an effective power mode between power saving and balanced.
Ok, here come the details:
Pictures from the old thermal paste situation:
The third picture shows some cleaning effort from me. I didn’t remove all the paste from the small capacitors to avoid chipping one off. Unfortunately, I didn’t make a photo after re-applying the paste, but I distributed it all over the die, and thicker than needed, so there would be even some room for improvements. I used Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, but I guess there are also other comparable or even better thermal pastes.
How I compared the before and after situation: It was not perfectly the same condition, but I did the following: I started CPU-Z and started the CPU stress test for multi core, 16 threads. Further, I opened sons of the forest, single player, new game. With the old paste, the starting point was in the moutains in snow, and after applying the paste, the game started at the water front. So there might be some difference in GPU and CPU load. I further was running around a bit to ensure that the load increases a bit. I measured in the modes energy saver, balanced, and full power.
The following figures show the results:
Energy saver, first old paste, then new paste
Next:
High power mode, first old paste, then new paste:
You see an improvement, and to a low extend this was reflected by the fan noise. But as I said, to play with reduced noise, I guess we have to limit the cpu/gpu load manually.
Another factor to be considered: I applied the new paste, and directly started the notebook and started the tests. I don’t know how the results will be in a few days when the paste is in its “final” position. Maybe it is more thermal conductive at the moment. lets see.
So I hope that helped a bit!
Framework team: can you support us with some hints about manual power limitations for CPU and GPU? SO a more granular steering of the power usage?
br
Tom
I experimented in addition with AMDs super resolution. This effectively brought the noise down in combination with the energy saver option.
At least for last epoch and sons of the forest, this worked for me. The fan noise is acceptable.
