Warning: cheap thermal paste on a server board caused 2 days of headaches

I swapped a heatsink on an old Dell R710 last week and used a budget paste I had lying around, not the stuff I normally stock. Temps looked fine at idle but the box kept throttling under load and I chased fan curves and firmware for hours before checking the paste spread. Anyone else had a paste that seemed okay at first but failed right when the machine got busy?

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elliot_grant3816d ago

Did you pull the heatsink to check the spread before you found it, or was it just a guess after all that fiddling? I had the same thing happen on a Supermicro board once, the paste looked fine for about an hour, then it turned into this dry, crumbly mess under load. Chasing those fan curves is the worst, you think it's a sensor or a BMC issue and it's just cheap goop. Glad you caught it before it cooked something.