You cannot cool a modern processor without using using thermal paste (preferably one of the best thermal pastes) to help transfer heat from the CPU to a heatsink. And most thermal pastes are made from either a combination of zinc oxide and silicone or some kind of liquid metal, because those materials are highly conductive. But what if there are other substances you have lying around the house that could either be substituted for or added to thermal paste to provide better cooling?
A TikTok user by the name of @mryeester, has been experimenting with a wide variety of foodstuffs to see if they can be substituted for off-the-shelf thermal paste. He has more than half a dozen videos showing his attempts to get household items such as powered sugar or maple syrup to help cool a CPU, but in almost every case, temperatures which much higher. However, when @mryeester added salt to some thermal paste, he saw temperature improvements of 2 to 3C over thermal paste alone.
One of his worst performers was replacing thermal paste with maple syrup, where temperatures were very bad, with his Intel CPU hitting 69C immediately in the BIOS.
@mryeester also tried adding liquid metal directly in the middle of the CPU, with a circle of thermal paste applied around the liquid metal, acting as a barrier to prevent the liquid metal from spilling onto the edges of the CPU (and killing the CPU). But unfortunately, after applying a CPU cooler to the chip then removing it, he found that the thermal paste spread over the chip perfectly and pushed all the liquid metal to the edges, making it completely useless.
But one of his experiments succeeded in actually outperforming normal thermal paste. This experiment involved salt, since salt has a higher thermal conductivity than most thermal pastes on the market today.
At first, @mryeester tried mixing iodized salt with thermal paste, and seeing what would happen. But unfortunately in this first run, he was unsuccessful. But next he tried grinding down the salt into a fine powder, then mixed it in with his thermal paste, and surprisingly this compound mixture worked. With his normal thermal paste his CPU was only hitting 49C, but with the powdered salted mixture, temps dropped by 2 to 3 degrees C.
While this is cool to see, we cannot say if this mixture will work in all situations. There could be a number of reasons why this mixture worked in this particular situation, including if @myyeester added too much or too little thermal paste in his test setup, or if his paste was not the best compound to begin with.
After testing more than 90 different thermal pastes, we've noted that some products have 1 to 2 degree better thermals than others. So this 2 to 3 degree drop mixing in salt might be matched just by using higher-quality thermal compounds.
Nonetheless, its cool to see a very unusual experiment like mixing salt with thermal paste work at all. Who knows, if TikTokers like @mryeester continue to experiment, they might find a new thermal compound mixture that actually works far better than the regular thermal paste products that we have today.
