Is it OK to use toothpaste instead of thermal paste when fitting a CPU?
Problem
I was told many years ago to do this by someone who at the time knew more than I did. The CPU was a celeron in the Pentium 2 era. It ran cooler with the toothpaste between the chip and the heatsink than what it did with nothing between. Has anyone else ever heard of or tried this? What were the results?
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1 Fix
Fix for: Is it OK to use toothpaste instead of thermal paste when fitting a CPU?
This is the standard "saran-wrap-in-place-of-condom" question. While some toothpastes may provide the correct type of thermal conductivity, "toothpaste" is too big a category to answer the question accurately. Worse, unless you want to make it a fun science project, nobody is going to be testing different types of toothpastes for thermal conductivity. That said, the answer is probably "yes." Toothpaste is definitely better than nothing, because air (i.e., nothing) is a terrible heat conductor. …
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