if it didnt have a thermal throttle you'd be seeing more than a 10C drop, because of the fan speed being lower.
done any benches to compare performance?
I wish I had strong numbers. Only two somewhat weak cases I can dig up:
Dota 2: 40-60fps to straight 60fps.
I had hwinfo run in the background and logging to see the thermal throttling states. It would reach close to 100, and had several "Yes" under core throttling flags.
Dota 2 performance would start at 60-70fps and drop to 40ish after everything got heated up (minimizing would reveal core clock bouncing between 1.4-1.8Ghz on CoreTemp)
After the thermal paste change, since temps go 85C max, there is no thermal throttling, and fps are stable 60.
Luxmark: 761 to 904
Since the 761 score is on Nov 13th, I suspect it was run during the 50% CMod. Running it again at 50% Modulation gets a similar result.
So its not really solid evidence.
I've never seen anything too terribly conclusive about thermal paste losing performance due to drying up. I'd suspect the majority of the improvement was from getting all that dust out. Certainly doesn't hurt swapping the paste while you've got it torn down though.
Well before changing the paste, I had a vacuum cleaner hose at the outlets of the laptop to hopefully get rid of any dust. The cleaner was kinda weak and I couldnt find my industrial blower i usually clean my heatsinks with
Nevertheless, idle temps did drop a bit, Id say 3-4C. But I still couldnt feel any hot air streaming out from the sides, and temps would still go 90+.
When I opened it all up, the HS was relatively clean and did seemed to be all that clogged up or dusty (except 1 small piece) which was probably causing airflow stream issues.
I feel like the paste change has definitely made the difference though.
