Overheard a guy at Micro Center say he'd never used thermal paste

I was picking up a new PSU last Saturday and heard this kid tell the employee he built three gaming PCs without any thermal paste. Said he thought the pre-applied stuff on the cooler was enough and never checked. The employee looked like he wanted to cry. I jumped in and told the kid I've seen CPUs hit 95C in seconds without proper paste. He had no idea his rigs were probably thermal throttling or worse this whole time. It made me wonder how many other basic steps people skip because they just assume things come ready to go. Have you run into customers or friends who missed something this obvious during a build?

3 comments

3 Comments

robin6287d ago

Man, that hurts to hear. Poor kid probably has no idea why his frames are dropping after an hour of gaming. I really hope someone catches him before he cooks another rig.

jennifer8337d ago

Let him learn the hard way, builds character better than any tutorial.

michaeld487d ago

Oh man, I don't know if it's that serious. Sure, learning from mistakes is real, but I mean... @robin628 is probably right that the kid's just gonna fry another GPU before anyone explains thermal paste to him. Idk, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like there's a middle ground between coddling him and letting him smoke a $500 graphics card. It's not exactly building character, it's just wasting money he probably doesn't have a ton of.