this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
316 points (96.7% liked)

PC Master Race

14955 readers
2 users here now

A community for PC Master Race.

Rules:

  1. No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
  2. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No NSFW content.
  4. No Ads / Spamming.
  5. Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.

Notes:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I have had this tube of MX4 since 2013, it's served me well, countless rebuilds of my computers, CPUs and GPUs alike, home servers, gaming computers, laptops, games consoles, pi4, I used this on everything. You served me well.

8th June 2013 to 4th November 2023.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, but you do want to occasionally rotate them around. They will separate over long periods of time.

If you have some expensive stuff that has been untouched for like a year, plunge it all out on a cleaned piece of glass, very, very, thoroughly stir it back up, and scoop/smash it back into the back side of the tube and then let it sit upright somewhere for about a month so all the air works itself back out to one end before using it again.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This really depends on how the particular paste is made. I've never seen MX-4 (carbon) or NT-H2 (ceramic) de-emulsify.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

It's not something you'd visually notice all that well. Just that the carbon particles (using mx-4 as an example here) will drift downwards instead of being equally dispersed in the paste. That can leave your solution you apply having too little carbon to do its job as well as it should.

No pastes are just liquid. They're all super finely ground solids suspended in a liquid, and the solids never weigh the exact same amount as a liquid, so given time, the always start to separate.