Thermal paste reapplication — how much did it help?

Quick one for the people who have put more hours into this than me. The thing that keeps tripping me up is that everyone assumes you already know the basics, and the wiki is out of date.

The default settings are clearly tuned for a different setup than mine. Hopefully this saves someone else the afternoon it cost me.

Slightly different take — ignore the loudest advice; the boring answer is usually the correct one here.

Not the answer you want, but measure before and after, otherwise you are just guessing whether it helped.

Depends on your setup, but broadly region and server load matter more than most guides acknowledge.

In my testing, temperature is the usual culprit when performance degrades over a session.

In my testing, that behaviour is intentional, even though it is poorly explained in-game.

Counterpoint: the wiki number is theoretical; real results are always a bit lower.

Had the exact same issue. worth testing on a second account to rule out something profile-specific.

That fixed it for me, at least.

Short version: the averages hide the problem; look at the one percent lows instead.

Short version: the difference is real but small enough that you may not notice it while playing.

Short version: it is almost always a setting rather than hardware, so try the free fixes before spending anything.

Report back once you have tried it.

Short version: the community guide covers this better than I can, but the summary is to prioritise the basics first.

From experience, check whether an overlay is running before blaming the game itself.