Blade 16 repaste

I want to add a comment here for those of you thinking about repasting. I bought a Blade 16 with the 4080 in it. PLEASE RZR, sell the 4090 with the QHD display (off topic :)). I always thought the PC ran hot just compared to my previous experiences.

In Intel XTU, settings on boost/High GPU, the Blade was thermally throttling, instantly hits 100c. I then went into overclock, disabled boost all together, kept the CPU at max 120w, and still instantly thermally throttling. I then undervolted the CPU in XTU (-.110 Core offset, -0.090 Cache for P & E Cores). It was of course thermally throttling still as I expected but the frequency on the CPU was higher. (I have not kept tuning from here, just the first settings I ran with from what I believed was a good starting point and it was stable for 14 hours with no HW Info Errors.

At this point I was really confident I needed to re-paste the computer. I have not done it before (but I do build quite a few desktop pc’s) and I was a bit worried about doing it. I live in Barbados now, so no local person I could trust to do it. So, I dug in. Heated up the stickers, pulled them off and pulled back the vapor chamber. The cables had me the most worried, I left the rear one on and pulled the front two off. 

The paste job Razer did. looked good so I was a bit worried I wasted my time to this point. But I continued and used Noctua NT-H2. I’m not using liquid metal, but wish I had Gelid GC Extreme or PTM7950. I have never tested the later two, just heard they are good options. I have used NT-H2 for years on my desktop’s, mostly water cooled and it works great so I’m comfortable with this choice even if others may work slightly better. 

Put the computer together, open XTU, Synapse, and HW INFO and rerun with the same settings as above however this time I turned boost back on in Synapse to the standard 160w. Hit start on the benchmark and watched in amazement. It hit power limits, and current limits, VRM heat limit, and very little THERMAL THROTTLING!  When it thermally throttled, all 4 limits were going off. I suspect if I had new thermal pads for the VRM or after a few days of them settling back in the VRM heat limit won’t be an issue.  

When the boost cycle was over, the power limit of 120W hit and the PC settled in at 85-90c and 4.1 - 4.15ghz at the 120W limit. I have no doubt I could raise that limit and continue tuning, which I may do in the future. For now, I am really happy with this result. The re-paste was a major success. I highly suggest if you are thermally throttling in XTU, with the OC enabled in synapse, after the boost phase, you need to re-paste your cpu/gpu.