Which thermal paste pattern is best?" this is a hotly debated question on which most PC builders will have an opinion. Personally, I am a line guy, especially with the advent of Intel's longer LGA 1700 chips. But there are plenty of blobs, X's, circles, and others that could probably be decently debated.

What about the Discord logo? What about the smiley face, as Tiktok account MrYeester (opens in new tab) tries to prove which brand logo is best for cooling chips in his latest PC experiment.

The best thermal paste pattern is all about coverage. Press the cooler onto the chip and spread the thermal paste to cover the entire heatspreader of the chip. To mimic this process, MyYeester tried various thermal paste patterns and crushed them with a piece of glass.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, bubbling the Discord logo onto the chip provides a relatively decent coverage of the chip. The bottom of his AMD AM4 processor, however, was ultimately not properly covered. A more surprising and potentially useful test compared square and circular patterns and found that neither covered the center of the chip. This is probably the worst case scenario, since the center tends to be the silicon hotspot.

Ultimately, it comes down to time vs. effectiveness, but let's be honest, MrYeester was whipping up plenty of thermal paste on some of these designs. To be honest, MrYeester whisked up plenty of thermal paste on some of these designs.

But this was another fun "what if" from the channel, which I first discovered when he tried to connect as many RAM sticks with risers as his system would allow. Incidentally, he succeeded with a leaning tower of five RAM sticks. And of course, that made the PC absolutely worse in many ways.

In this channel, he even used a car tire to apply thermal paste to the CPU. On the other hand, the CPU is now coated with thermal paste. You did it. On the other hand, you probably don't need it anymore.

If you actually need thermal paste advice, too much is generally better than too little. With a little more generous application of paste, you can apply it any way you want (as long as it's not too much); for longer chips, like Intel's 12th and 13th generation chips, try to stretch the pattern out a bit more to ensure full coverage.