Stuttering after thermal paste replacement and drive change.

Recently did an upgrade from a 256 GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. While I was under the hood I did a thermal paste replacement for some Arctic MX-4 on both my CPU and GPU since I have the model that has a standalone graphics chip (Radeon MX Vega series). When I had the heat sink and heat pipes off I noticed the thermal pads that were next to the processors had been slightly damaged, looking like they were pinched off from too much pressure.

Symptoms that make me think it’s the VRM are According to XTU (Intel extreme tuning utility) whenever I experienced significant repeated frame drops, it sent a “True” signal for Power Limit Throttling, which leads me to think that the VRM was thermal throttling which restricted the max power the processors could pull, resulting in the CPU thinking it had reached the maximum power. After a few seconds of frame drops, the clock increases to normal levels, voltage also increases, and the True condition goes away.

Should I put a new thermal pad on?

Maybe explore alternate VRM cooling solutions?

Any advice would be great.