I recently bought a tube of HM500 thermal paste for around $2. I've heard it's general-purpose and may not be the best for gaming, which is what I do a lot of. I'm wondering if I should invest in a higher-quality thermal compound or if this one will be sufficient for my Geforce RTX 2060 GPU and i5-12400F CPU setup.
1 Answer
For most people, the type of thermal paste isn't a huge limiter on performance. Even if HM500 isn't top-tier, it should hold up fine for gaming. Just be prepared that you may have to replace it sooner than if you used a more premium product.
So you're saying performance won't be drastically different compared to higher-end thermal pastes?