Can You Really Use Toothpaste To Cool Your CPU?

Category: OCC News
Posted: May 13, 2009 11:52PM
Author: jammin

While that may appear to be a rather silly question, the surprising answer is that in fact, you can! (although don't expect it to last long). Now, we are of course talking about Thermal Interface Material (or TIM), something that anyone who has attempted to keep their CPU as cool as possible should be intimately familiar with. Products such as Arctic Silver 5 have been long standing favourites with the enthusiast crowd, but what happens when you are putting together a new build only to realize you have none in the house? Well I suppose you could do the sensible thing and order some more in, but that could take precious time (and stopping in the middle of a build is to be avoided at all costs). The other option is to improvise and substitute specially formulated TIM for something easily available in most households.

Fortunately, thanks to one of our dedicated forum members you no longer have to blindly pick an item from your kitchen cupboards that you think will be most suitable for this task. That's right, gabrieltessin has taken the guess work out of the process by testing a number of alternative thermal interface materials to gauge their effectiveness. An old Pentium 4 was subjected to helpings of peanut butter (creamy, not crunchy), toothpaste, raspberry preserves, hair styling clay and chapstick among others. The results were somewhat surprising, with a lot of the materials holding their own and often proving preferable to using no TIM at all. You can view the process and results in our forums. Further materials are already planned for testing, including duct tape and cheese wiz. Should be interesting!