Unless you’re building a battle station of a gaming PC with the most expensive parts money can buy, it’s a good idea to allocate a higher percentage of your budget to select components. For instance, you’d want to spend over half of your PC-building funds on the graphics card, with the processor deserving the second-highest priority.

However, the thermal paste is always overlooked when estimating the expenses, largely because even the most premium options cost a fraction of the overall budget. But when you're looking to minimize the expenditure, you may come across some unbranded options that offer large amounts of thermal compound for bargain prices. Having purchased one such kit a few months ago, I decided to pit it against the Corsair TM30 to see if the former is worth buying. Spoiler: It’s not.

Disclaimer: When I talk about thermal paste from no-name brands, I mean the bottom-of-the-barrel options that include ten or even twenty times the amount of compound you’ll find on similarly-priced branded units. Of course, the TM30 is nowhere close to the best thermal compounds out there, but it's still good enough to be considered a quality thermal paste.

The test bench for this experiment

Since I wanted to test both thermal pastes under strenuous loads, I decided to use my Ryzen 5 5600X processor that’s liquid-cooled by a Kraken X52 AIO. I also enabled PBO and Resizable BAR in the BIOS and used an RTX 3080 Ti to avoid any GPU bottlenecks when running the gaming-related tests. I'd also modified the Power Plan in the Control Panel to force maximum performance out of every component, including the CPU. Finally, I prevented my motherboard from putting the idle CPU cores to sleep by disabling the Global C-States option in the BIOS. Although this option bumped my idle temps up a notch, I wanted to see the maximum performance and temperatures that CPU can hit with each thermal paste.

Stress testing the unbranded thermal paste gave distressing max temps…

And I was low-key afraid my CPU would melt down mid-testing

Speaking of the tests, I used different methods to check the temps and stability of the system with different thermal pastes. Once I’d cleaned the existing paste on my Ryzen 5 5600X, I decided to test the unbranded thermal paste first. After booting into Windows, I let the PC remain on standby for a few minutes to gauge the idle temps. Next, I ran the Intel Burn Test – and just to make things interesting – I subjected it to the Blend torture tests on Prime95.

Since I was using PBO, I expected the system to crash at least once. But to my surprise, the cheap thermal paste managed to pull through without running into any stability issues whatsoever. But inspecting the temperature metrics in HWiNFO64 revealed a curious trend: although the average temps were slightly higher than normal, the maximum temps had hit the red zone more than a couple of times.

So, before I go around discussing the gaming trends, it’s time to fast-forward to a few hours later, when I repeated these tests using the premium-quality thermal paste. And as you’d expect, the average and max temps were lower this time, especially in the Intel Burn Test. Meanwhile, the premium thermal paste only had a few spikes above the 90°C range in Prime95, whereas its unbranded rival was already averaging at 93°C.

…And the situation wasn’t very different on the gaming front, either

At least the frame rates weren't all that different

Although stress testing tools are a great way to measure the stability of a processor, they tend to put a lot of unrealistic load on the CPU. So, I decided to compile the benchmarks and charts I obtained after running a couple of games. For each title, I dialed the resolution down to 1080p while keeping the settings locked to Ultra to force my CPU to spread its wings.

FPS-wise, there wasn’t too much difference between each title. But once again, the unbranded thermal paste had higher max temps in pretty much every case barring a few exceptions. With both torture test and gaming benchmarks done and dusted, I had enough evidence to write up the verdict.

Is unbranded thermal paste worth your money?

Absolutely not! If you value the longevity of your systems, there’s no need to resort to poor-quality thermal paste units. Thankfully, there are plenty of budget-friendly alternatives out there that can keep your processor nice and cool. In fact, you won’t find a lot of difference in the stability and temps when picking a budget-friendly option over a premium thermal paste unit. Just be sure to avoid no-name brands, and you should be fine as long as your gaming war machine has adequate cooling provisions.