I’m using the cheapest paste I could find, some 25g tubes of Ceramique 2 that I picked up on sale for about $2 a piece, and it performs within spitting distance of the more expensive premium pastes that I’ve got. I’ve thought about trying some of the “boutique” solutions like CL Liquid Ultra, but for the $10-$15 I can essentially buy two or three more emitters and cherry pick the best one of the lot instead. Plus, I don’t have to worry about getting conductive goop on the driver or emitter as I would with Liquid Ultra.
I’m a little curious about the discussion of thermal pastes degrading quickly when used on naked dies. Back when the single core Athlon processors were popular, I had a 3200+ running smoking hot with a semi-passive heatsink for years without issue. Heck, even two months ago I replaced the thermal pad on a cheapo Gigabyte 785G motherboard northbridge with some ancient RCA branded thermal paste to give it a little more overclocking headroom, and there hasn’t been any sign of the paste deteriorating despite running constantly at around 65C.