Had a guy at a retro game store warn me about cheap thermal paste on modded Switches

Was in a shop in Portland last fall picking up a used joycon shell. The dude behind the counter saw me buying a $5 tube of thermal paste and just stopped me cold. He said he fixed three Switches that week where that exact stuff dried out after 6 months and caused overheating. He showed me photos of the crusty residue on a heat sink, looked like old glue. I swapped to Arctic MX-4 for like $8 more and never looked back. Any of you run into paste that just fails fast on a hot mod like a GPU swap?

2 comments

2 Comments

jenniferb5322d ago

Oh man, that chalk dust description is way too accurate. I actually read a breakdown from a repair shop owner on another forum who tested like 30 different thermal pastes under load. The cheap stuff basically has a lot of filler that evaporates or hardens way too fast. They showed a graph where the budget paste hit dry failure in under 500 hours on a hot-running chip like the Switch's Tegra. Meanwhile the decent stuff held up for thousands. It's wild how such a small difference in price can totally save your hardware.

gavin_reed22d ago

Man that crusty residue photo bit really got me. I had almost the exact same thing happen with a cheap tube off Amazon on my first PS4 hard mod. Six months later the temps were spiking like crazy and when I opened it up it looked like someone poured chalk dust all over the chip. It didn't even spread right in the first place, just kind of sat there like paste that was already half dry. I learned the hard way that a few extra bucks is nothing compared to frying a whole console. Glad you caught it before it wrecked your Switch.