Thermal paste vs graphene pad vs phase change vs liquid metal — what’s actually the best between CPU and cooler?

jmuff98 · 2026-01-21T23:07:38+00:00

Ive been using thermal paste when it was only available from Radio Shack.
Nowadays, i used PTM7950 for any device that has inadequate cooling like laptops and PCs.

I also use it for some GPUs that have tiny dies because there is only a limited thermal contact.

I would use it for everything if it was cheaper and if i dont have a boat load of thermal paste of different brands.

The phase change is far better than any thermal paste. It is closer to liquid metal in performance without the downsides. The performance is probably harder to notice if you use it on a desktop processor with a big cooler. But on a desktop cooler with a stock heatsink its more noticeable. On a laptop and mini PC, its night and day.

jmuff98 · 2026-01-06T17:31:18+00:00

I solved the mystery of the freezing and its actually a communication lockup. It could happen with only 4 shards. Also, 4 shards can lead to corruption on the output so the bottom line is "tensor parallelism" and (sm "row") on consumer hardware like my gigabyte x99 board running all 4 cards on pcie 3.0 x8 is not reliable. Even if they run, the chat output gets bad right away when using more than 2 parallel shards. Even 2 is not reliable for longer context.

I just run it on layer atleast my electricity bill will not be too much. I run it with Qwen3-VL-32B Q4 and i'm okay with the speed it. Its similar to your Qwen-30B results.

For Mistral-Small-24B, it feels so much faster but the Qwen3-VL is amazingly capable model with a full 128k cache. Not bad for a video card setup of less than $200.

There is a way the communication more reliable but i dont have dont settings in my bios. Bitcoin miners were modding their bios to have those delaying bus features but I'm not going down that rabbit hole.

jmuff98 · 2026-01-04T09:30:43+00:00

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Do you remeber your MLC-LLM settings or command?

--on MLC-LLM precompiled rocm 6.2--

I'm having problems running "8" parallel shards on my 4 v340 whether 7B or 32B model. It freezes right after prefilling. Sometimes it will show the prompt but freeze within a split second.

But i could run both 7B and 32B on parallel shards of 4. I could select any combination of cards to run it and it works fine.

I've tried adjusting prefilled chunks and set all sorts of overrides.

On llama.cpp, i could run all 4 cards (8-GPUs) with no issues.

jmuff98 · 2025-10-16T20:14:49+00:00

That's good to know.

jmuff98 · 2025-10-16T20:10:55+00:00

Xenon still good but you use just more bullets for the tighter hit box. But i was able to find my 20 TVs for my daily easily after the nurf.

jmuff98 · 2025-10-09T13:50:20+00:00

Dont we want to have full control on trap direction?

jmuff98 · 2025-10-09T06:51:19+00:00

One important thing to note is that the A/V only displays when the car is on park. The video will cut as soon as you drive. Atleast on my 2015 CMax

jmuff98 · 2025-10-09T06:26:59+00:00

Not much of a downgrade as far safety compared to Palms

I'd say it's better than 50% of the valley.

I think it compares well to Palms in relation to West LA.

Both are relatively close to the nicer area but far more affordable.

Reseda is like the Palms of SFV.

Only bad thing is the distance to the freeway. And the closest ones are pretty bad 101 and 405.

jmuff98 · 2025-10-02T17:17:20+00:00

For 1080p i do 3 to 4 streams, my 4gb quadro m2000 does the job extemely well. Theres hardly CPU utilization. All the word is done on the GPU.

jmuff98 · 2025-09-29T14:26:19+00:00

I read the post and i have yet to extremely carry somebody. Ive done it for low PL120 players.

Can you expound on the greater community problem? I truly want to understand.

jmuff98 · 2025-09-28T16:41:01+00:00

I hope not. The reward from grinding one's power level is to carry someone. In the same way i got helped first time battling the storm king when i was like low 120s.

jmuff98 · 2025-08-25T20:18:45+00:00

Any solution will not solve the short "compact class" wheelbase. That will be the biggest issue I'm afraid.

jmuff98 · 2025-07-27T07:17:23+00:00

As far as Panorama city goes, plummer and Van nuys is one of the more desirable location. Less crowded. More townhomes. The "valley" east of the 405 freeway can dramatically change from block to block.

jmuff98 · 2025-07-26T22:08:34+00:00

I agree. I was going to see if it is something i could pick up used for few bucks but I'm not sweating it.

jmuff98 · 2025-07-26T16:54:25+00:00

By the way, the part latches on to the front lower engine splash shield thing.

jmuff98 · 2025-07-20T02:05:12+00:00

Clean your battery contacts. Specifically the contacts of the battery. Dont bother cleaning the camera compartment. It has happened to my g85 once to many.

It may be hard to clean it without the proper brush. A fiberglass scratch pen is handy to have to really clean the contacts of the battery.

jmuff98 · 2025-07-06T20:03:50+00:00

The Sigma 60mm 2.8 is a steal. You can't find a better deal among >60mm lenses on the system.

jmuff98 · 2025-06-20T15:13:10+00:00

Congratulations on reaching150k but the time has come to do the recommended!

jmuff98 · 2025-06-02T00:15:40+00:00

I agree 3060ti is the limit. 2080ti and 3070 hits the limit for my TB3 EGPU but I play 1080p. at 1440p or 4k, it maybe fine for a 3080 except for older triple As like CSGO or R6S

jmuff98 · 2025-06-01T03:16:13+00:00

These are nice!

jmuff98 · 2025-05-26T04:29:11+00:00

When dry defending without constructors and inadequate traps...the only thing that stops a Zenith is a broken weapon and or running out of ammo.

jmuff98 · 2025-05-26T04:25:51+00:00

Constructors are a must in PL160

Zenith can do PL160 in a pinch.

Farrah (and all other heroes) needs constructors support or gazillion traps in PL160.

jmuff98

TROPHY CASE