Glossary/Thermal/Thermal paste (TIM)
Thermal paste (TIM)
Thermal paste is the compound filling microscopic gaps between a chip and its cooler, so heat conducts through it instead of through insulating air.
Also known as TIM, thermal interface material, thermal compound
Not measurable from a browser
A browser cannot read temperatures, power draw, fan speed, VRAM capacity, clock frequency or native FLOPS. For a direct reading use a native monitor such as HWiNFO64, GPU-Z or lm-sensors. SystemCheck contributes the other half: whether the condition is costing you throughput, measured as decay and consistency.
Two nominally flat metal surfaces touch at only a small fraction of their area; the rest is air, a poor conductor. Paste fills those voids. Applied correctly the layer should be as thin as possible while still filling the gaps. Excess paste is worse than the right amount, because the compound conducts far less well than metal-to-metal contact.
Paste degrades. Standard compounds dry out or pump out over two to five years, particularly under repeated heating and cooling cycles. A gradual rise in temperature at the same load over years, or a widening core-to-hotspot delta on a GPU, is the classic signature. Liquid metal conducts better but is electrically conductive and attacks aluminium.
SystemCheck cannot measure any temperature and so cannot evaluate your paste directly. What it can do is bracket a repaste: record CPU decay and consistency before, repaste, then re-run under the same ambient conditions and load. A meaningful improvement in decay is evidence the repaste helped; unchanged decay points at a power limit or airflow instead.
Related terms