Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut Review – Pricey, But Still Respectable

EDITED 14/1/2025: We mistakenly identified this as the Kryonaut thermal paste – after confirming with the distributor we’ve confirmed this is another Thermal Grizzly product, the Hydronaut. The review article has been amended to reflect the change, but data remains valid.

Walkaround

Note: we received this sample from local distributor (Sun Cycle Sdn Bhd) with only the bare hardware (no packaging or accessories). Retail packaging should see accessories, including the integrated scraper, included.

The Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut comes in various capacities, from smallest (1g / 0.38mL) to the largest (26g / 10mL) – our unit is the moderately-sized 3.9g / 1.5mL which is good for several CPU swaps, something that reviewers like us do a lot when testing various hardware around the year. The cap uses a screw mechanism to open and close, slightly different than the conventional cap seen on most syringe form factors.

Like most thermal paste on the market, the Hydronaut has a viscous light gray liquid ejected from the syringe, though it does come with an alternative scraper cap that can help flatten the paste on the CPU’s integrated heat spreader (IHS).

Specifications

Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut (1.5mL, S-TG-H-015-R)

Full specifications available on product webpage.

Color	Light gray
Thermal Conductivity	Unspecified
Electrical Conductivity	Non-conductive
Operating Temperatures	-200°C to +350°C
Viscosity	140-190 Pa·s (kg/m·s)
Density	2.6g/cm³
Volume / Weight	0.38mL / 1g 1.5mL / 3.9g – As tested 3mL / 7.8g 10mL / 26g

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K
Cooling	Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux 30th Anniversary Edition > Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition
Memory	AGi UD858 DDR5 TURBOJET RGB (DDR5-6800 CL34, 2x16GB)
Storage	ADATA LEGEND 960 MAX 1TB
Power Supply	GameMax Rampage GX-1050 PRO (ATX 3.1) 1050W
Case	VECTOR Bench Case (Open-air chassis)
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 24H2

Thermals

As the data shows, the old dog that is the Hydronaut still got it: against the better ones we tested thus far (we excluded the worse-performing ones to make the graph more readable), the Thermal Grizzly is, for the most part, just 1°C hotter than the Cooler Master MasterGel Maker that we’ve used for years as the thermal paste of choice for our benchmarking systems.

Verdict

While it’s commendable that the Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut is still very much a great-performing thermal paste many years on, there’s one significant downside as far as Malaysian market is concerned – the price. The local MSRP for the 1.5mL version costs RM65, which is significantly more than the Cooler Master MasterGel Maker we used (which has the price of around RM30-40 today). Still, if you’re willing to pay for it – we can confidently say it still delivers.

Special thanks to Thermal Grizzly’s local distributor, Sun Cycle Sdn Bhd, for providing the Hydronaut thermal paste for this review.