You can’t cool a modern processor without using a thermal paste (preferably one of the best thermal pastes) to help transfer heat from the CPU to the heatsink. Also, most thermal pastes are made either with a combination of zinc oxide and silicon, or some kind of liquid metal. This is because these materials are highly conductive. But what if you had other substances around your home that you could substitute or add to your thermal paste to provide better cooling?
A TikTok user named @mryeester, have tried different foods to see if they could be used in place of commercial thermal paste. He has no less than a dozen videos showing his attempts to get hold of household items like powdered sugar and maple syrup to help cool the CPU, but most of the time the temperature is much lower. will be higher. However, when @mryeester added salt to the thermal paste, he found that the temperature improved by 2-3°C over the thermal paste alone.
@mryeester has had more failures than successes.I tried molding thermal paste like a box I checked how bad the spread was with the IHS of the CPU, and found that the thermal paste only spread towards the outer edge of the CPU, leaving the central area intact. At least on Intel chips this would be a terrible application as the CPU die is in the middle of the chip and there is no thermal paste on top of it in direct contact so the die gets very hot.
However, changing paste placement is much better than nothing at all. You can create However, even when the center is not covered, the temperature is higher compared to when the entire IHS is covered.
@mryeester tried several other thermal paste videos to show interesting paste placements and alternative materials, though not necessarily targeting better temperatures. In one he tried Shaping the Discord logo from thermal paste This time I completely covered the IHS after spreading the thermal paste. Clearly, however, the discordance shape itself provided no advantage to the dispersal, as the dispersal was perfectly uniform across his IHS.
In another video he uses thermal paste icing sugar, we believe that the fine-grained material provides sufficient contact between the IHS and the CPU. Sadly the temperature was about 60 degrees hotter than the thermal he paste and it wasn’t.
@mryeester (opens in new tab)
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One of his worst performers is thermal paste Maple syrup, The temperature is so bad, his Intel CPU hits 69C right away in the BIOS.
I also tried adding @mryeester Liquid metal directly in the middle of the CPU, A circle of thermal paste applied around the liquid metal that acts as a barrier to prevent liquid metal from spilling over the edge of the CPU (and destroying the CPU). But unfortunately after applying his cpu cooler on the chip and then removing it he thermal his paste completely spread all over the chip pushing all the liquid metal to the edges making it completely useless I found
However, in one of his experiments, it was able to outperform regular thermal paste. Salt was used in this experiment because it has a higher thermal conductivity than most thermal pastes on the market today.
@mryeester first tried mixing iodized salt with thermal paste and see what happens.But unfortunately with this first run, he failedBut then he ground the salt and fine powder, I mixed it with his thermal paste and surprisingly this compound mixture worked.With his regular thermal his paste, his CPU only reached his 49C, but with the powdered salted mixture, the temperature increased to Dropped 2-3°C lower.
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This is great, but I’m not sure if this mixture works in all situations. For example if @myyeester added too much or too little thermal his paste to his test setup or if his paste wasn’t the best compound to begin with.
After testing over 90 different thermal pastes, we’ve found that some have thermals that are a degree or two better than others. So this 2-3 degree salt mix can be matched just by using a good quality thermal compound.
That said, it’s cool to see some very unusual experiments like mixing salt into thermal paste. If TikTokers like @mryeester keep experimenting, they may find new thermal compound mixtures that are actually much better than the current regular thermal paste products.
