Between your CPU and its heatsink there is a tiny, almost invisible layer of grey paste. It looks like nothing. It is, in fact, the only thing letting your processor talk to its cooler in any meaningful thermal way.
And it has a shelf life.
What thermal paste actually does
Two metal surfaces — even ones that look perfectly polished — are not actually flat. Under a microscope they're a moonscape of microscopic pits and ridges. When you press a CPU heat-spreader against a heatsink base, the high points touch but the low points trap air.
Air is a terrible conductor of heat. So those tiny pockets of trapped air are where your cooling system loses efficiency. Thermal paste is designed to fill those gaps with a material that conducts heat much better than air does — usually a suspension of metal-oxide or ceramic particles in a silicone or hydrocarbon carrier.
How long it lasts
Manufacturers don't publish hard lifespans because the answer depends on temperature, humidity, and how often the chip cycles between hot and cool. As a rough workshop rule:
- Stock OEM paste (laptops, prebuilt desktops): 2–3 years before it noticeably degrades
- Mid-tier paste (ARCTIC MX-4, Noctua NT-H1): 4–6 years easily
- Premium paste (Kryonaut, Hydronaut): 3–5 years — better thermal conductivity but they dry out a bit faster
- Liquid metal: 5+ years but conductive and risky if it spreads
Signs your paste needs replacing
- CPU temperatures climbing year-on-year despite a clean case
- Fan noise that's loud immediately on boot, before the dust theory kicks in
- Your laptop's palm rest getting hot during simple browsing
- Sudden shutdowns under load that weren't happening before
- You've never had it changed, and your unit is more than 3 years old
Which paste should you use?
ARCTIC MX-4 — the workshop default
The paste we use on every Deep Clean tier. Excellent thermal conductivity, dead easy to apply, no electrical conductivity (so you can't short anything if it spreads), and a 6–8 year lifespan in real use. For 90% of desktops and laptops, this is the right answer.
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut — the gaming choice
About 1–2°C cooler than MX-4 in our bench tests, but pricier and shorter-lived (it dries out faster, especially in hot Manila summers). We use this on the Overhaul tier when a customer specifically wants the lowest possible temps for gaming or rendering.
Bargain pastes from random eBay listings
Don't. We've benchmarked enough mystery pastes to tell you they perform worse than the dried-out factory paste you're trying to replace. If you're going to take the cooler off, spend ₱400 on a real tube.
Liquid metal
Genuinely effective — drops temps by 10°C+ over conventional paste — but electrically conductive, corrodes aluminium, and stains your IHS permanently. We don't recommend it for customer units. We will install it on request, with a written waiver.
The 30-minute job that buys you years
A repaste isn't a complicated procedure. Lift the cooler, clean the old paste off both surfaces with isopropyl alcohol and a lint-free cloth, apply fresh paste in the right pattern, reseat the cooler with even pressure. Done.
The reason most people don't do it themselves is that the consequences of getting it wrong — chipping a die, bending a socket pin, spreading paste into the socket — are expensive. So it's a job worth handing to a bench that's done it a thousand times.
Booking a repaste? We include before/after temperature readings on every job, so you can see the drop. Call 0920-857-0392.