Thermal Paste Comparison, Part One: Applying Grease And More

Why Do We Test Each Paste In Four Scenarios?

In choosing four test platforms, I incorporate feedback from our valued readers. For instance, you wanted to see us take the cooler mounting pressure into account. We're skipping the LN2-based testing and focusing on scenarios you'll encounter in the real world. For example, we're using popular pre-assembled water coolers that should ensure heat sink temperatures below 60 °C (140 °F), premium aftermarket air coolers with back plates that should demonstrate high mounting pressure, and a run-of-the-mill budget cooler with push-pin mounting (that'll give us limited pressure). Stock coolers like that let the CPU get above 60 °C/140 °F (AMD) and 80 °C/176 °F (Intel).

Depending on viscosity and composition, not all pastes are a good fit for every application, nor are they all well-suited for novices. This warning also applies to replacing the heat sink on your GPU, and we'll discuss that separately below.

First, let's take a look at the three systems I used to test each thermal compound.

Testing Thermal Paste on a Graphics Card

This is a somewhat sensitive topic, and for safety reasons I excluded electrically conductive or liquid metal pastes from my testing. Since GPUs don’t have a heat spreader, but allow the cooler’s sink to directly sit on the die, I didn't want anyone to risk a short circuit.

I also used an older graphics card, which was convenient to test with. Its cooler was mounted using four screws and its fan speed could be dialed in to a constant value. Furthermore, I figured that an older card would be more tolerant of the higher temperatures I'd see. After all, we didn't want a cheap paste to destroy an expensive, current-gen board. Fortunately, the GPU die size and surface temperature are still comparable to modern mid-range cards.

Test Cycles, Test Duration and Settings

I should also explain how I took my measurements. Because the digital temperature sensors built-in to modern CPUs only give us uncalibrated Tcore values, I used the old way of measuring die temperature with a thermal diode under the heat spreader. The processors in this story still use soldered-on spreaders, so this value should be fairly accurate. I'll report the difference between Tcase and the room temperature, since that latter figure wasn't as constant as I would have liked through all of the benchmarking.

For the graphics card, I used the temperature as the GPU reported it. That number wasn't influenced by minor changes in room temperature.