Thermal Grizzly - Hydronaut - 26 Gram/10 ml - Conductive High Performance Thermal Paste - Ideal for Air and Water Cooling CPU/GPU/PS4/PS5/Xbox - for Large Cooling Surfaces

For those who know, this stuff is superb and comes highly recommended.For those who may be looking at doing their first PC build, or maybe venturing into the realms of overclocking their CPU, this review is aimed at you.Thermal paste is one of the cheapest items in a PC build but arguably one of the most critical.You see this is the stuff that goes between your CPU and your heatsink (cooler).It has the job of improving the transfer of heat from your CPU (which wants to be as cool as possible) and your heatsink, which also wants to be cool, but is tasked with absorbing then dissipating heat.Good thermal paste makes a significant difference to that heat transfer.No paste by the way, like a non-working heatsink, makes for a short lived CPU!Thermal Grizzly (great name!) have a reputation for making very good forms of this stuff.If you have never bought before, don't be surprised at how small the tube is.You only need a very small amount of this stuff, and accordingly the tubs is tiny.The key to success is clean surfaces and not using too much (which this what most people do the first time or two).If doing a build with a new CPU and heatsink, then chances are you have the clean surfaces to start with.Some heatsinks come with thermal paste pre-applied.Personally I would remove it as I prefer to know exactly what I am using on the most important part of my build thanks.If you are having to remove existing paste, the process is simple enough and requires cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol (surgical spirit).This is used as a cleaner because it removes the paste very well and evaporates quickly leaving clean dry surfaces.When you are ready to apply, squeeze out an amount about the size of a grain of rice on the centre of the CPU (making sure it is seated in its socket on the motherboard first!!) and then do the same again, next to the first.That is really all you need. There is a spreader included but I do not really see the point of it.As you place your heatsink over the CPU (make sure the mounting plate is on your motherboard and securing screws are in place before you do this!) the paste will naturally spread out over the surface of both. When you tighten down the heatsink (don't overtighten) it forms a tight seal between the two.By the way, if you use too much paste it just oozes out at this point and becomes a messy issue you need to fix swiftly.This stuff I use with all of my builds and as an example, in conjunction with a Coolermaster ML280 cooler it keeps an old i7 (stock 3.5ghz) running at 4.2ghz at temperatures no higher than 72c regardless of how hard I push things.That is seriously impressive (as is the cooler!) and is why I totally recommend this paste.Oh and building your own PC (most probably for gaming) is actually far easier than you may think. Give it a go!Thanks for reading and I hope it was useful.

Hydronaut was originally marketed for AIO coolers but doesn't matter as the purpose remains the same. Used this model on a fan operated CPU and the temperatures came much lower than my previous OEM thermal paste.Paste had a very good consistency to spread, and wasn't messy. Did a very good job.

What can you say, the results are well tested and publicised, use it for all my thermal paste needs.

I think the picture tells a thousand words.I bought this thermal grease because one of my servers was showing unusual high temperatures while under heavier load. This is important for me as this machines runs 24x7 non stop all year. I found it had the factory thermal pad and all was correctly assembled. However, this is a consumer machine and probably not meant for always-on. Reading about it I also found that different thermal grease compounds perform differently and found the Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut to be among the best in reviews. So I decided to try it. My servers uses LibreHardwareMonitor to keep logs of CPU load and temperature so I thought it would be easy to compare.Appling the thermal grease is easy. It comes on a syringe and has an accessory to help spread the grease flat and uniform. Assembled everything back together and powered it on. Today I was curious and checked the LibreHardwareMonitor logs. It's a fact that the temperatures came down quite a bit. Makes sense. The grease transmits the thermal energy faster to the heat sink which in turn dissipates it. The CPU does not accumulate as much thermal energy. I'm an happy customer. On the pictures you'll see that around 2AM CPU load increases. That's the file server backups and the virtual machines backups running. On the top 2 graphs you'll notice temperatures are higher at that point in time than in the bottom 2 graphs which are from the 21/10/2020 after applying this thermal grease.

I am very impressed by the performance of hydronaut. I purchased it to replace the arctic grease I had been using for a couple of years. I am using it on a core i7 10700k @5.1ghz with stock vcore and a 2080ti with a 1000mhz vram overclock. My system is fully water cooled.Whilst these figures are semi-irrelevant, as my setup will differ from your your own, my GPU temps sit at around 50-55c at full sustained load (blender testing and gaming) and my GPU temps sit at 58-64c at full sustained load. This is an improvement of nearly 10c over the arctic grease.I happily recommend hydronaut for both cpu and gpu use. I have not tried it on an air cooled system (as I don't have one), but for water cooling purposes it is the best that I have ever used.