Best Thermal Grease/Paste?

basically its whatever you prefer.

personally i use artic silver 5 never had a problem with it and i always recomend it compared to that crap intel sends with its boxed processors.

any name brand of thermal paste/grease will be good quality, just beware of the white sutff that looks like elmers glue in the unmarked plastic. it really is glue.

I think as5 is the standard

Regarding the Arctic 'X' materials, they say that the efficiency of the product actually improves, as it cures - although this takes 300 hours...

That makes a certain amount of sense, although I wonder what percentage of improvement one would see.
It also would seem to make testing the full range a bit more time consuming. Let's see, 300, carry the 2... this would take 2 weeks of 24 hour operation, with a reasonable load, before it would be ready for the 'torture test'.

It would definately be an interesting article for Tom's.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Cool!

Hmmm... actually, I can't find any such article on MaximumPC.com...

Be Well!
Fireheart

That must be a rather time-intensive study you're doing, Wusy. Testing not onloy the different thermal compounds, but gathering comparison data on how they perform with different contact surfaces. Perhaps you should publish?

Someplace, I recall seeing a poster recommending that one use AS5 between a GPU and waterblock, but stating that Ceramique was better for the RAM-chips in the same installation (Danger Den-type full-coverage waterblock). Struck me as odd, at the time, but if, as you're saying, different compunds work better with different contact surfaces (which does make a certain sense) then the issue seems much clearer. One would want to choose an array of thermal compounds to maximize the effect of each cooling instalation. Or, as seems most common, one would choose a superior compound for the critical interface (like a processor) and use it elsewhere as a 'good enough' solution.

I didn't mean to question MrsD's assertion (or yours), simply that I didn't find the article online. So many PC mags, so little time. I generally only do a search on topics that I'm currently curious about and have 2-3 'general' PC news sites and forums that I watch for mention of interesting topics.

It seems clear that some sort of thermal interface compound is better than none at all.

Be Well!
Fireheart

You're right, Fireheart, the bottom line is that the use of thermal paste is necessary, no matter what paste you can get your hands on. Aragorn is also right, 5 degrees celsius with AS5 IS IMPORTANT (to overclockers like me! ).

you need to get the mag to get all their articles. The do not put everyting online as they are primarily a print release. That being said, I have read them since they were "boot" and while they are a tad slower on new release hardware tests then sites like Tom's, what/how they test and their conclusions are generally dead-on. Whatever hardware you want truly tortured they have or will do it. I have read articles where their tests resulted in speakers smoking in ruin and psu's sweating from heat. Good stuff.

Their conclusion in the article was that as5 and that liquid metal performed the best, w/ liquid metal being more expensive and harder to use. BUT, all compounds did well, w/ only ~3 degrees diff from all of them.

I have used Arctic Silver's various revisions on all of my systems, but if I "only" had another brand I would use it w/ no regrets.

interstingly mPC also had a blurb about how much paste apple used on their intel macs... so much that it was overheated and ran crappy until they re-applied it for testing... just amusing how apple assumes stupidity on their customers part and gives them crappy quality wrapped in swank design.

on my 6800 ultra gpu i use to use as5 temps were around 69 - 74 at load, so i thought i should reapply some, so i took it off cleaned it, couldnt find the as5, so i tried zalmans paste that came with the zalman cu-77000 fan and now temps r 68 - 70. it could be that the as5 just lost its heat transfer after time, but this stuff works just as good for me

I hadn't seen that article before but it was quite informative. Thankyou. I guess this means that if we have a really mirror smoothe surface we should be using AS Ceramique rather than AS5 and AS5 of other applications.

Yep, that article and the ones related to it have caused me to consider the 805, instead of sticking to AMD. It would require that I learn a lot more about overclocking - I realize it is primarily a matter of working the various ratios of voltage, clockspeed, & FSB to produce some stable ideal, but I just don't know enough to feel secure about diddling with the numbers.
Still, this would be a good solution to my plodding old system. I'm looking into it.

Be Well!
Fireheart

I'm partial to silver-oxide based thermal paste. I used some radio-shack thermal paste once and it was more of an insulator than anything. The proc ran at 90c (no joke. P4 3.0 woodie).

All I did was change the thermal paste to an OCZ thermal-oxide paste and she runs normal: 50c idle and 60c loaded.

I disagree, only based on experience. If you use something cheap/non-name-brand, you're taking a risk.

1) I used a razor-blade to remove all of the old goop
2) I cleaned both surfaces with rubbing alchohol and a clean Q-tip
3) I waited for the surfaces to dry.
3) I put the paste in a pile in the middle of the processor and pressed down evenly, preventing any air from being trapped between the processor and the paste
4) I trimmed the edges of any paste that leaked out Ketchup & Hamburger style.


The "white goop" can fail you. Considering good thermal paste is like $5-$10, and your processor is usually $200+, do yourself a favor and get the good stuff.

It's a good point. Maybe I applied too much.

I figured with the amount of force I put down and the fact that the surfaces are flat, it would spread out (I've had air bubbles from using a razor-blade). That's why I stopped doing it that way.

Never had much success with putting a drop in the middle of a proc and dropping the hsf on top then battening it down. I use a pin that came with a dvd burner for opening the drive through the little hole in case the open/close button doesn't work... use it like a paint roller, put on a nice thin coat over the whole processor, works pretty well.

In reply to ZoldMan: Don't put Liquid Metal on anything but the processor. This will keep it from eating metal parts in your computer. Thought I'd pass that on...

PDH-NicFury 8)

we have already established that using any thermal compound will allow sufficient cooling. What these last few posts have been is talking about those last few degrees of temp that can be saved by using ac5 or liquid metal over other types. At that point, any benefit of even .5 degrees can result in a "win" for a particular method/product.

In the case of the "bb method":

That is the heat spreader. It "spreads" heat over its surface to allow a larger contact area for the heatsink. Yes, it does protect the cpu but that is not its only purpose. Basic physics allow that the entire piece of metal will transfer heat. even the corners that are not directly on top of the cpu. You are right in that the majority of heat is lost directly over the cpu, but the rest of the spreader does get hot.

I am not trying to be argumenative, just pointing out that at this point in this thread, we were talking about saving maybe 1 degree in cooling. In that case spreading the grease over the entire sink will allow more transfer, which may lower temps another half a degree or so. That is an improvement.

Essentially that is what you are doing by rubbing both components to "fill the gaps" before installing. Same thing I was saying, just different way of doing it. That is the whole purpose of the compound anyway, to fill gaps allowing better overall heat transfer. That is also why you need very little of it no matter what method you use.

Ok, one more results page. Check this one out with better detailed results.

http://www.thetechzone.com/reviews [...] age9.shtml

CoolerMaster does not use their own thermal paste, they have to use what their customers (AMD, Intel, HP, Dell, etc) request.

The best thermal pastes are:

Dow Corning 5026
TIM Consultants Matrix II
Shin-Etsu Microsi X-23-7868

Where did you get this idea from ?? Have you actually used it yourself ?
I have used it b4, and although it is tough to separate cpu and cooler\block, it is definitely possible.

Don't spread false information.. do your homework 1st.

i use arctic silver 5 and im really happy with the results, but 2 things: THIN LAYER!!!
On my first time i placed 2 much and there was a 5 C diffrence.
2nd : replace each 1-2 years. Yes, unfortunatelly any thermal paste after 1 year, 2 max simply loose its effectiveness.
This is a huge pain in the ass in the Mobo especially ;D.

It has been killed.