The thermal paste swap on my launch PS4 was night and day

I picked up a used launch PS4 from a pawn shop in Columbus for $80 back in March. The fan sounded like a jet engine and the thing would shut off after 20 minutes of Call of Duty. Finally cracked it open last weekend and the stock thermal paste had turned into dry crumbly dust. Replaced it with some Arctic MX-4 I had left over from a PC build. Now the fan barely spins up and I played for 4 hours straight with no issues. The difference in noise and temperature was honestly shocking for a $10 tube of paste. Has anyone else had a console that was basically choking on old thermal paste? What kind did you use?

3 comments

3 Comments

jordanl821d ago

My launch PS4 is fine with stock paste and 6 years of dust.

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mark_cooper1d ago

Honestly I wonder if the old paste in yours just hasn't dried out yet because of where you live or something. I've seen people swap paste on systems that were totally fine and it made no difference. Maybe the factory paste quality varies a lot between batches.

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joseph9321d ago

The factory paste quality thing is a good point. Sony probably uses whatever they can get the cheapest bulk deal on that month so one batch might be great and another might be crap. I remember seeing a teardown of an early PS4 where the paste was almost liquid and another that was like dried clay. It probably depends on the factory in China or wherever too, different assembly lines could use different thermal compounds. So your experience could be totally different from someone else's even with the same model.