Avoid thermal paste overload on your AMD Ryzen AM5 CPU with Noctua's guard

(Image credit: Noctua)

A simple piece of plastic but a clever idea: Noctua has made a thermal paste guard to protect your AMD Ryzen 7000 chip from becoming an absolute mess once it's slathered in thermal paste.

AMD has put together a wonderful looking heat spreader for its Ryzen 7000 CPUs. So wonderful, in fact, it's a bit of a nightmare to clean once you put much-needed thermal paste all over it. Every corner and crevice will get loaded with the stuff. But you might be able to make life a little easier with Noctua's new NA-STPG1 guard and cleaning set.

The guard is literally a piece of well-fitting plastic and it sits around your processor to catch any paste that's squeezed over the edge of the heatspreader. The kit also comes with 10 cleaning wipes if you're a particularly mucky pup.

Ultimately, it shouldn't really matter if your chip gets thermal paste all over it. Most standard paste is non-conductive nowadays, so even if it does get over your processor, VRM, graphics card, desk mat, monitors, face, etc. you're probably alright, electrically.

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I imagine this kit will appeal a lot more to anyone that benchmarks overclocks chips often, or has a tendency to fiddle with things incessantly, as you really accumulate a lot of thermal grease on your chip when you're swapping them out and reapplying every couple of hours/days/weeks. I've had to get the alcohol out just to clean layers of gunk off even regular looking CPUs, let alone AM5 ones. The alcohol is to clean the chips, I'm not getting drunk before I start. Most of the time, anyway.

Noctua has only today announced the kit so as far as I can see it's not available anywhere to purchase just yet. That said, it is listed over on Amazon marketplaces across the globe, and you can find your local link here.

AMD's Ryzen 7000-series CPUs are out now, though. You can find out what we think about them before you buy over in our AMD Ryzen 7950X review and AMD Ryzen 7 7700X review.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.