I don’t know how accurate my impression necessarily is, because I don’t do a lot of thermal pasting, but for my second thermal paste experience, I really appreciated it. It was definitely better than the tiny plastic pouch that came with my first non-stock cooler, and the black aesthetic is better than the stock silver (even though it’s technically unnoticeable). I really appreciated the tester tool, (though it’s a little difficult to fully spread the paste out, given that I’m not a CPU cooler, lol). The holder is really nice and I like that it’s magnetic, because it provides a nice way to flaunt all the best parts of my relatively fancy PC to anyone I might find an opportunity to brag to (none and counting, it’s just hard to bring that up without seeming pretentious!) It works really well with my case, since it has a clear front and side panel, and it fits perfectly right beside my case’s front fan triplet, with the label on the paste tube conveniently aiming perfectly out that front window. It also provides a nice opportunity to add some personality to the fairly minimalistic case. After all, it has some open space apparently intended to be used for figurines and stuff, but since I’m not a figurine guy, that space just stays open without something like this. I’ve been using it with my new i5-14600KF in order to do some heavy compiling, and even with Intel’s aggressive power management, which I discovered will sometimes embrace critical, near-throttling temperatures to squeeze out max power on high loads (and give a careful owner a heart attack), the PC only touched boiling once or twice on the heaviest compilation I did. Most of the compilations, which on average take a minute or two, took only a few dozen seconds, without the PC being able to get hot enough to thermal throttle even if it wanted to. So far, I’m a happy customer!
