Anyone else changing VGA thermal paste?

So I decided to completely void my warranty on my EVGA Geforce GTX 650 by taking the stock heatsink off and replacing the stock TIM with some what I happened to have lying around (Cooler Master Thermal paste that came with my Hyper 212) just to see if there would be any improvement.

Well, guess what? It idles up to five degrees cooler and runs up to 20 degrees cooler under a pretty bonkers overclock. And that was with me punishing it with the MSI Kombustor GPU burn in tool set to the Torus with no post-processing, no AA and full 1080p.

Obviously, being a 650, it doesn't perform all that well, but at least now instead of creeping steadily past 80 degrees celsius it hovers at around 60 degrees. This is absolutely insane. Especially since I just transplanted it into a different case with noticeably worse ventilation.

So, yeah. Anyone else notice similar results from switching thermal paste?

Not really. I have a PNY GTX 650 2GB and my temps usually hover around 60c. I've though about changing the thermal paste, but I always seem to be fighting the card when I OC, so I just gave up. I changed the thermal paste on my old HIS 5830, and only noticed a drop by a few degress, but nothing crazy. I also used the cheapest paste I could find, which happens to be from CM, and it dries up fairly quickly, about every year or so. Might spring for AS5 once my CM tube runs out since that isn't crazy expensive like it used to be.

 

I would probably just grab a really cheap and relatively small tube of Shin Etsu paste, as it happens to be some of the best stuff on the market. Arctic Silver is veery nice though. So if you wanted to get a larger tube to have on hand, I could definitly understand the appeal. I think I may go back through and clean it off a second time to do a better job of it and replace the TIM with Arctic Silver Matrix. I just didn't have the time or patience when I went through it this time to find some lens cleaning wipes like I ordinarily use for thermal paste cleanup, and I didn't have a good spreading device handy for tinting the surface like I prefer to do as well. All sorts of problems and it still does this well, I'm fairly well impressed (also, if it makes a difference, my Cooler Master TIM is only a few months old and is still very gooey, which is really convenient for installation.)