Best Thermal Paste (For CPU & GPU) – Top 13 Reviews of 2020
Thermal paste is often the overlooked product for a lot of new builders computer setups. This can be down to a lack of experience or the simple fact that coolers already come with thermal paste pre-applied.
While the pre-applied thermal paste will work, it is often very old and has been sitting in a box for months on end. With this in mind, it is always a better idea to buy and apply your own thermal paste when installing your CPU for better temps at stock speeds.
Thermal paste needs changing annually, as it will eventually dry out and begin to lose its effectiveness. If you leave the thermal paste on too long, you will begin to see performance issues and gradual overheating which can damage your CPU in the long run.
Can you just apply any thermal paste? What is the best thermal paste for your needs? Let's take a look and breakdown what truly is the best thermal paste available in 2019.
I’ve been using Arctic Silver for my processors since it’s release in the mid-2000s, and have always had great temps with it. Using silver as a base, it has great heat transfer.
The MX-4 uses carbon micro-particles to make sure it fills in all the air gaps on your heat sink, helping to ensure better heat dissipation.
Thermal Grizzly made the Hydronaut to be effective for systems using water cooling, while still maintaining a great price-for-performance ratio.
Thermal Grizzly designed the Kryonaut to work with even the most extreme overclocked systems still using a traditional thermal paste.
How We Choose
When it comes to thermal paste suggests we take extra care to ensure you get a quality product to fit your needs.
- What’s Current? No one wants to get outdated information that’s going to do them no good. Making sure that we are on top of the market and current trends is a must!
- Research is key. The computer and tech market can be confusing. It’s hard to know where to start, and what’s accurate. We take this out of the equation for you by doing the research before we suggest anything.
- Narrowing down. Once we’ve gathered together our list of potential selections, we research the items themselves to see which particular thermal paste comes out on top.
Once we have that final list, we purchase the various brands of thermal paste and begin to test.
Things to Consider
Knowing what the best thermal paste is one thing but picking the best thermal paste for your needs can be tricky. There is a thermal paste for almost every situation so which one is it?
There are several things you should consider when buying a thermal paste for your needs. First though, let's go over what thermal paste is, and why you need it.
What is Thermal Paste?
Thermal paste (also sometimes known as thermal grease or thermal compound) acts as a heat transfer agent on a CPU’s heat spreader or IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader). Its basic compound consists of zinc oxide.
Your processor generates a lot of heat. So much heat that you could literally fry an egg on it.
This is bad, high heat can fatally damage components very quickly, especially high-end graphics cards and processors. In order to combat this, we have heat sinks.
Air Based Heat Sinks
A heat sink is what you put on the CPU to transfer the heat and keep it cool on top of a CPU heat spreader or IHS (integrated heat spreader). Traditional air heat sinks have a metal base that touches the processor. The heat is transferred through that block of metal and usually channels into copper pipes, which are then attached to layers of thin metal fins with a fan blowing on it to dissipate the heat further.
Water Coolers
Water coolers work on a similar principle. The heat sink sits on top of the AMD or Intel processor with water running over it (sound dangerous, right?). This heats up the water, which gets funneled into a radiator. The radiator has channels and metal fins on it with fans that blow on these metal fins. This cools down the water before its return trip to the CPU heat sink.
So where does thermal paste play into all this? Glad you asked.
Thermal Paste’s Role
Figure shows a processor with a fan heatsink on top of it. Notice the holes and divots (exaggerated for effect) in the two pieces of metal. These holes trap air, which insulates the heat. Thermal paste seeps into these holes and divots, helping to conduct the heat rather than insulate it.
Thermal paste sits as a layer in between the processor and the heat sink; here’s why.
Metal isn’t typically perfectly flat. No matter how flat it may look to the naked eye there is always bumps and grooves and little holes and divots. These holes and divots and bumps trap air when another piece of metal is pressed against it.
This is bad as air is an excellent insulator of heat. This means the heat transfer from AMD or Intel the processor to your heat sink isn’t optimal and often can overheat/ harm your system.
Thermal paste resolves this issue. Not only is it engineered to be thermally conductive (meaning it helps to transfer heat from one area to another), but since it’s in a liquid form, it can press down and get in between all the little nooks and crannies that usually trap air when thermal paste isn’t used.
That’s why you need to use a thermal paste - specifically, a thermal paste that performs outstandingly like-named brands (Arctic, Thermal Grizzly, etc.).
Thermal paste properties
When looking at thermal paste, there may be a few properties you’re unfamiliar with, or you may be unsure how a paste positively impacts thermals. Let’s take a look at what those are and how they fit into the puzzle.
Viscosity
This refers to how thick/thin the thermal paste is. Those with a higher viscosity are thicker, and more like actual paste, and usually will adhere your heatsink better to your processor.
Those with a low viscosity are more liquidy and will tend to dry up over a few days after applied to set in. It is worth noting that a lower viscosity thermal paste can potentially leak onto your motherboard quite easily if too much is used.
Specific gravity
Specific gravity is how dense and heavy the thermal paste is, and generally isn’t listed on most thermal pastes, and isn’t usually needed to take into consideration. That being said specific gravity is expressed in g/cm³ which stands for grams per cubic centimeter.
Thermal Conductivity
This is the most important measurement to pay attention to. This unit of measurement tells you how good the thermal paste is at moving heat from one place to another.
This is measured in watts per square meter of surface area, shown as W/mK. Let’s look at a couple of examples from our list:
| Thermal Paste | Thermal Conductivity (W/mK) |
|---|---|
| Arctic Silver 5 | 6.0 W/mK |
| Thermaltake TG-8 | 4.7 W/mK |
| Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut | 73 W/mK |
Generally speaking, the higher the number, the better the paste should be at conducting heat away, but there are always other variables and this may not always be the case.
Thermal Design Power (TDP)
The TDP of your processor will tell you how much power it will use. You can use this as an estimate of how hot it’s going to get. Those with a higher TDP will use more power, which generates more heat.
This is something to consider when choosing a thermal paste, as a hotter processor is going to need a thermal paste that can match it.
You can find this number listed on your processor specs under TDP.
Ambient Temperature
The air around your system can play a huge part in determining how cool (or hot) your system runs. If you live in an area where the temperature is constantly hot, you might want to look at upgrading your thermal paste.
The air inside of your system that is situated around your processor can affect results as well. If your other components run hot (say like your GPU), that ambient air can affect your system as much as the temperature outside can.
Cooling Solution
Choosing the correct cooling solution can have a huge impact on your system overall. Even if you have the best thermal paste on the market, if the rest of your system isn’t set up to handle the amount of heat your processor generates, it’s not going to matter.
Level of Familiarity
How comfortable you are with working on your own components may play a factor into what thermal paste solution you decide on.
If you’re a beginner and you’re worried about the possibility of harming your components, you may want to look into thermal pads instead of a paste. While not as effective as a paste, it’s very quick and easy and won’t harm your components.
Whether or not it’s electrically conductive is something else you should think about if you’re comfort level isn’t very high, as some thermal pastes are made with materials that conduct electricity.
There are also liquid metal thermal pastes, and these require special care to apply without harming your components.
Find out more about the processes of properly applying thermal paste.
How We Tested
When we sat down to bring you the best thermal pastes of 2019, we did our research and found out how many options were available as a consumer.
The options are endless, and they all proclaim better performance than the last. We knew we had to test them out personally, to make sure we recommended only the ones that work as well as they claimed.
The Systems
We used an old in-house system to do all the testing so we could maintain consistency. We went with our Ryzen 1700 setup. Here’s what it’s running.
- AMD Ryzen 1700 @ 3.7 GHz
- 32GB of G.Skill Flare X @ 2666 MHz
- Gigabyte Aorus Radeon RX 580 XTR
- CoolerMaster MasterLiquid 240 AIO
The Test
When designing the test, we wanted to make sure to cover all of our bases to bring you the best results.
We measured:
- Ambient temperature
- Temperature during idle
- Temperature during full load
- Temperature during full load, while also using the GPU to generate more ambient heat
Before testing we cleaned the processor using a thermal paste cleaning and polishing kit from Arctic Silver. While isopropyl alcohol will work, we wanted to make sure to get the heatsink and processor as clean as possible so that the results for the next thermal paste weren’t contaminated.
For the test itself, we used Prime95 as a CPU stress test. This program makes good use of a processor’s computing power to generate as much heat as possible.
While most of your gaming time probably won’t be spent with a maxed-out CPU running complex mathematical equations, we wanted to make sure we got the proper data for testing our thermal paste.
If the thermal paste can handle the stress of Prime95, it can handle gaming.
We ran Prime95 for an hour on its own to bring the processor up to temp. After the hour, an additional hour of gaming was added on top of it WHILE Prime95 was still stress testing.
This let our memory and GPU start generating heat, adding to the ambient temperature inside the case. This can affect load temperatures as the heat difference of the processor and the air around it start to come closer. The heat from the processor will start to dissipate less efficiently at this point.
After the testing was done, we reset and went again with the next thermal paste.
13 Best Thermal Pastes in 2020
| Product | Details | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |  | Arctic Silver 5
| Check Current Price |
| #2 |  | Arctic MX-4
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| #3 |  | Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut
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| #4 |  | Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
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| #5 |  | Arctic Silver Ceramique
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| #6 |  | Cooler Master High Performance Thermal Paste
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| #7 |  | MasterGel Maker Nano High Performance
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| #8 |  | Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme
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| #9 |  | Thermaltake TG-8
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| #10 |  | Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut
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| #11 |  | Innovation Cooling Diamond
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| #12 |  | Innovation Cooling Graphite Thermal Pad
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| #13 |  | Prolimatech PK-3
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Arctic Silver 5
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity6.0 W/mK
PROS
- Price Point
- Author’s choice
- Company claims it will never dry out
CONS
- Thermally conductive
It’s already 2019 but if you’re looking for a thermal paste that’s been tried and tested, then look no further than Arctic Silver 5. As mentioned earlier, I’ve been using this thermal paste for years and I’ve never had a heat-related component failure due to my thermal paste going bad.
Testing
In our testing, Arctic Silver 5 did very well, being one of the coolest-scoring pastes on our list. Even under full processor load, our processor never made it over 53°C (127°F).
Arctic MX-4
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity8.5 W/mk
PROS
- Highest rated thermal paste on the list
- 8 year advertised life span
- Non-conductive
CONS
- Comes at a higher price point, but you get a 4g tube
The Arctic MX-4 is the highest rated thermal paste on our list, and the results show why.
It’s a little on the expensive side but you get a large, 4g tube of paste, which they claim has an eight-year life span, so it should last you for a long time to come.
Tests
The results don’t lie! This thermal paste showed it can handle some heat, coming in at a nice chilly 57°C (134°F), even under full load during gaming.
Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity11.8 W/mk
PROS
- Non-conductive
- Designed for introduction to overclocking
CONS
- High price point
The next selection up from Thermal Grizzly is their Hydronaut. And yup, you guessed it, it’s designed for water-cooling setups. Although it’ll work for any coolers, not just water.
Tests
The Hydronaut did even better than the Aeronaut paste, never getting any warmer than a nice and a cool 54°C (113°F). There was nothing I could throw at this paste that it couldn’t handle while gaming.
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity12.5 W/mk
PROS
- Best non-conductive thermal paste
CONS
- Price point
Another heavy hitter from Thermal Grizzly: Kryonaut. The naming scheme doesn’t quite follow the others when it comes to this one as it’s not designed for sub-zero cooling solutions; it’s just a word that indicates cool temperatures. Name aside, this is another great product from Thermal Grizzly.
Tests
I don’t know how Thermal Grizzly does it, but this one tested even cooler than the previous one. Coming in at a nice and frosty 53°C° degrees celsius (127°F), this is probably the best CPU thermal paste (it’s also likely the best thermal paste for GPUs, but we didn’t test it on GPUs).
Arctic Silver Ceramique
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity8.5 W/mk
PROS
- Price point
- Non-conductive
- Company claims it will never dry out
CONS
- N/A
Made by the same guys as Arctic Silver 5, Arctic Silver Ceramique uses a ceramic base instead of silver.
Giving their consumers a non-conductive, beginner friendly thermal paste was a good choice by Arctic Silver. This thermal paste won’t short anything out if you accidentally get some overspill when applying it to the processor.
Tests
In our testing, the Arctic Silver Ceramique didn’t score quite as well as its predecessor, but the results were still very favorable for gaming. This paste never got over 61°C (141°F), keeping our processor cool even during intense gaming.
Cooler Master High Performance Thermal Paste
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity4.5 W/mk
PROS
- Non-conductive
- Price point
- Comes with a spreader and templates for easy application
CONS
- N/A
I guess being great at making cases and power supplies wasn’t enough for Cooler Master, as now they’ve given us great thermal pastes.
The first one we tested was the Cooler Master High Performance branded thermal paste. Designed to be a great overall thermal paste, it definitely meets the mark. It even comes with a credit card like spreader and sticker templates to help you apply the thermal paste to the processor with no mess-ups!
Tests
In our testing, this thermal paste did pretty well, coming in at 63°C (145°F). Still in that 60-degree area, it’s more than suitable for intense gaming.
MasterGel Maker Nano High Performance
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity11 W/mK
PROS
- Easy to spread
- Comes with a spreader
- Non-conductive
CONS
- Price point
The second product we tested from Cooler Master was the MasterGel Maker Nano branded high performance thermal paste. Claiming to get even better performance than the other one we tested, Cooler Master touts this paste for more extreme cooling solutions. This thermal paste also comes with a spreader for easier application.
Tests
This thermal paste did end up testing better than their other high performance paste, coming in at a nice cool temp of 61°C (141°F), making this an excellent choice for keeping your system cool while gaming.
Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity8.9 W/mK
PROS
- Comes with spreader
- Non-conductive
CONS
- High price point
Gelid Solutions is another one of those companies that I hadn’t really heard about, but the thermal paste was suggested to me, and so on the list of pastes to test it went! I’m glad I did, as the Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme did excellent in our testing trials.
The Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme is non-corrosive, non-toxic, and requires no curing time. It also comes with a handy spreader to take the guesswork out of the equation when applying the paste.
It does come in a larger tube, though, which means you are paying more overall for thermal paste you might not necessarily need too often.
Tests
I was pleasantly surprised with the GC-Extreme, as it came in at 61°C (141°F) under full load while gaming, making this an excellent decision.
Thermaltake TG-8
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity4.7 W/mk
PROS
- Non-conductive
- Comes with a spreader
CONS
- High price point
Thermaltake enters the mix with a thermal paste touted as a solution for extreme performance, it's made this thermal paste out of a diamond powder compound.
They also say it has a longer lifespan than other thermal pastes, but they don’t specify a definite answer.
Tests
Surprisingly coming in at 70°C (158°F), this was the hottest thermal paste tested next to the thermal graphite pad. While it’s still within reason for gaming, the higher price point and higher temps make is a less desirable option.
Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity8.5 W/mk
PROS
- Non-conductive
- Made by a company widely known for making great thermal paste
- Comes with spreader
CONS
- High price point
Thermal Grizzly is where we start to enter the little bit more expensive, “premium” thermal pastes. However, they are widely known as being a company that makes great thermal pastes for extreme solutions.
The first in their line is the Aeronaut. As you can probably guess from the name, it’s made more for people running air cooling solutions, such as a simple fan and heat sink.
Tests
The Aeronaut paste did very well in our tests, never reaching higher than 57°C (134°F). This will keep your system nice and cool, even if you’re on any air coolers you’d find in the market.
Innovation Cooling Diamond
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity4.5 W/m-k
PROS
- Non-conductive
CONS
- Paying extra for bling
The Innovation Cooling Diamond thermal paste uses a non-conductive base with crushed synthetic diamonds sprinkled in.
While the company claims the diamonds provide superior thermal transfer, it doesn’t appear to help any more than a standard thermal paste.
Tests
Coming in at 60°C (140°F), the Innovation Cooling isn’t the coolest on the list, but it does hold up quite well. Is it worth the extra couple of dollars to get it just because it has the diamonds? Maybe not, but it’s still effective and it’s still a pretty good price point.
Innovation Cooling Graphite Thermal Pad
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity35 W/mk
PROS
- Beginner friendly
- Non-conductive
- Reusable
CONS
- Not for extreme cooling
Innovation Cooling has their diamond thermal paste for more extreme cooling, but maybe you don’t need something like that, maybe you want to go with this easy to apply thermal pad instead.
These are great for beginners and veterans alike. They’re Non-conductive, and they’re basically a sheet you place on your processor. It does the same job as thermal paste, just without any mess.
It can also be reused, making it a perfect choice if you’re doing testing over and over again.
Tests
The thermal pad was our hottest-testing thermal solution, coming in at 77°C (170°F). While this isn’t exactly frosty, it’s still within normal operating temperatures.
Prolimatech PK-3
TECH SPECS
- Advertised Thermal Conductivity11.2 W/mk
PROS
- Non-conductive
CONS
- High price for small amount
Prolimatech may not be a brand you’re familiar with, but that shouldn’t stop you from considering it. Made with a non-conductive nano aluminum compound, the PK-3 showed great results in our tests.
Tests
The Prolimatech PK-3 was one of our better testing thermal solutions coming in at 53°C (138°F). This is right under the frosty 60-degree range, making this a great pick for your gaming machine.
Which Thermal Paste is Best for You?
As you can see, there is a wide variety of thermal pastes available on the market now, and a lot of them are viable for keeping your gaming system cool.
- If you’re a beginner, you might want to use Innovation Cooling’s graphite thermal pad. While it didn't provide extremely cool temperatures, it still kept the system running cool enough for gaming and day to day use.
- If you’re looking for a thermal paste that’s tried, tested, and guaranteed to keep your system cool? Arctic Silver 5 is the thermal paste for you. This has always been a very reliable paste for me, and it will be for you too!
Related Pages
Whether you are looking to improve the cooling solutions of your current PC or looking to ensure cooling is sufficient from the beginning, check out some of our other cooling guides below.
Conclusion
Now we have been through what the best thermal paste could be, what will you pick for your system? Personally, I’ve been running Arctic Silver 5 on all my previous systems (this one too).
Arctic Silver 5 has worked out very well for me, and I’d recommend them to anyone looking to up their thermal paste game.
But what about you? What do you use? Is it on this list or something else entirely?
