 Welcome back to the workshop. Today we're gonna be checking out different methods of applying thermal pastes. The line, the P, the X, the whatever. We'll check them all out. This question was submitted by Nthrustle on Twitter. If you have a question for us to explore on the workshop, submit it to either Twitter at Luke underscore lafr or just in the comments down below this video. Apacers AS720 is a dual interface SSD with USB 3.1 type C on one end and SATA on the other with read speeds of up to 540 megabytes per second and write speeds of 450 megabytes per second. Check the link in the video description to learn more. So I watched a bunch of different YouTube videos of people building their rigs and looked at a bunch of different build logs to try to accumulate all the different ways that someone may or may not apply thermal paste so we can try all of them. The first and most common was the P method or the dot method. Then we had the line, then there was plastering it out or spreading it around. Then there was adding way too much in whatever way you managed to do that or way too little. Then there was the medium line where you just do kind of a short line which I like to call the extended P. Or there's the spiral or there's putting a bunch on and then putting a little plastic bag over your finger and pushing it around. So we'll see if there's any difference or how big that difference is. All right guys so last time we had a workshop episode I made a straw poll about asking you guys what power supply you thought would perform the best. This time we're gonna have two straw polls. Which thermal paste application solution do you think is the best? And which thermal paste application solution do you think will be the worst? But vote before you see any of the results. Don't cheat. That's super lame. Just vote on what win you think is going to win and then watch the video. First method we're going to try is the dot or the P. That should probably be fine. A pretty good rule of thumb is just look at the size of the top of the capacitors near it. If you're around that size you're probably good. Okay so the dot method has been applied. I grabbed a thermometer here to check the ambient temperatures that are in the room and going into the case. I'm going to load up Ida64, run a system stability test on just the CPU. We will then wait 10 minutes, take a temperature reading on the ambient temperature, then take a temperature reading on the CPU. So the temperature that Ida64 is giving me is about 47 degrees and the temperature that the ambient is in the room or the warehouse right now is 16.8 degrees. Next up we're going to try the line. The line is the next most common one. The theory with the line is that you want to go over top of all the things that are under the IHS or the little metal plate there. So as you can see from the dot we got a nice kind of circular pattern and it covered everything on the CPU without going way too far out. Okay so yet again we're just cleaning everything off with isopropyl alcohol and then we will try the line method. So I'm going to try to have the line be pretty thin especially because this is really thick thermal paste that I'm using. Here we go. So let's get the cooler on. So the line method also produced a temperature of 47 degrees, the exact same as the dot method. And the ambient temperatures in the room are exactly 17 degrees which is 0.2 degrees higher than the previous one. So basically everything's the same. You can see with the line method it actually kind of sort of looks like a circle like we got from the previous method the dot or the P. That's just because of like even pressure from the cooler. A lot of them are going to somewhat look the same. I don't know maybe that's the conclusion but we'll figure that out later on. So our next method is going to be the X. I have never done this one personally. So to anyone that does the X, sorry if I do it wrong. I don't know that looks like a lot of thermal paste to me. I'm not really a fan of the X. So the X method resulted in a temperature of 47 with an ambient of 17.2. So the temperature read out by the computer has not gone up by one and the ambient has not gone up by one. So yeah time to try some other stuff. I think I'm going to skip the medium line one. As we saw the dot and the line and the X were all basically identical. So we'll try this spiral and then we'll do some other crazy ones after that. Oh wow it's not really working. No one called me an artist. So for the weird awkward horrible application method of a spiral in terms of thermal paste, we landed with 47 degrees celsius with an average room temperature of 17.2. So exactly the same as the X method and functionally the same as every other one. So time to move on. I guess next up we're going to try too little. So adding not enough thermal paste at all finally gave us a different result of 54 degrees read out by Ida64. The thermometer is still reading 17.2 so the ambient is the same. Meaning yes your temperature goes a bit higher if you don't add enough thermal paste at all. Okay let's move on and try too much thermal paste. Warning if you're doing this all on your own you want to make sure that you're not adding way too much thermal paste. Because if it squishes out and goes onto your board or goes anywhere else it might conduct and short things out. Too little thermal paste gave us a number that was higher. So hopefully way too much gives us a number that's higher too because I kind of think it will. And if it doesn't I would feel a little silly. I was wrong it's 47 degrees read out by Ida64 and 17.3 degrees ambient. Which is effectively the same as basically all the other tests that we've had. I expected this would be more because we have been told less is more in terms of thermal paste application since forever. And even though we didn't get that result I'm actually going to stand by that. If you had a conductive thermal paste you wouldn't want it to be splooshing out so much. On the CPU the thermal paste coverage actually isn't too bad. Which is probably why the result ended up being pretty good. But as you can see from the block there is a ton of extra thermal paste scooping mainly over the sides. So we had too much but I guess it wasn't like absolutely excessively too much. To the point where it's actually spilling onto the board. Okay so now I'm going to try to spread it around with like a card or whatever. I don't know how well this is going to work especially with IC diamond. IC diamond doesn't really like to spread. I'm just going to try to squish it out onto my finger. Okay so I was going to do two spread out tests. One where I spread it out with a card and one where I spread it out with my finger through a plastic bag. But I guess I just am going to have a bunch of thermal paste on me. And we're going to combine both of those tests into just spread it out with your finger. Okay so this is the last test. I kind of think the result's going to be 47 degrees. It got 47 degrees out of Ida64 and 17.3 degrees ambient. So the conclusion I guess is just don't use way too much. Especially if you have conductive and don't use way too little. And you're probably fine. I think the easiest one to do would probably be the line or the P method. Other than that it's really not a big deal. I don't really know what else to say. I guess that's actually a pretty good conclusion for a workshop episode. That's what makes these things fun. Crunchyroll is the site created by anime fans for anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight out of Japan. Like Myriad Colors, Phantom World, or Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans. They have a large collection of the most popular anime series like Fairy Tail and Gate. With all the new content on their site being professionally subtitled all the time. Which is great. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and you can sign up for a 30 day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium. If you enjoy the many benefits of Premium like 1080p streaming, ad free service, getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream anywhere anytime on a variety of devices like your phone, tablet, game console, or computer, or whatever. You can continue your Premium membership to Crunchyroll for only $6.95 per month. So again head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and check them out. Thank you for submitting this question. If you guys have other questions let me know. Dat Twitter Luke Underscroll AFR in the comments down below down there that'd be cool too. Thanks for watching this episode of the workshop. I wonder how many people are going to be pissed because they've been trumping around forever that you have to do it this specific way and it doesn't really seem to be that way at all. Or how many people are going to tell me I did the test wrong. That'll be interesting too. We'll see that later on. Anyways if you enjoyed the video like it. If you just hated it because I screwed everything up dislike it. Don't forget to subscribe that's cool too. These are Amazon affiliate code to shop for stuff like thermal paste. And probably not spudgers because it's fine. You can just do whatever method you want. And you know you can buy a shirt which isn't this one. You can buy Linus Tech Tips shirts. And you can become a contributor on the forum. That's another thing you can do. Check out this video where other people were mad. Because I said that your cable management doesn't really matter that much. Cool. See you next time.