Thermal compound, stock or Arctic silver?

yabadabadoo

yabadabadoo

yabadabadoo

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Joined
25 Jan 2009
Posts
12
Hi,

Just a quick question;

Is the conductive paste that normaly ships with after market cpu coolers any good at all, or is it worth buying/using something like Arctic 5 silver?

Kind regards,
Fred.
 
Welcome to the forums. :)

It depends on the manufacturer. Arctic cooling Freezer 64/7 Pro's ship with their excellent MX-2 pre-applied. Thermalrights stuff is very good too.
 
Actually it stands to reason. Think of it. Someone has little to no experience of custom cooling. They have a stock heatsink. They buy an after-market heatsink and it comes with a pre-applied paste. They fit the heatsink and immediately see a huge reduction. This is because of the heatsink.

Then, the cooling starts to degrade alomost certainly because of dust.

They know they have a great heatsink so believe that Antartic Alumina 2009 is going to be their saviour.

They remove the heatsink and clean off the base while also cleaning out all the dust. Remembering the lessons from the first time they fitted the heatsink, this time, having carefully applied the bare minimum of paste to their cpu, they then fit the heatsink much better than the first time and with a properly fitted nice clean sink and paste applied to the cpu instead of the heatsink, they see massive difference and credit the paste.
 
Thanks for that.
I'm waiting for delivery of xigmatek 1283 to be fit to a new E8500
From what I've seen on youtube the X1283 comes with what looks to be cheap white paste!
Just thought I'd ask befor spending even more money on this project!
I guess another £6 for As5 is worth it,
Cheers,
Fred
 
MikeTimbers said:
Actually it stands to reason. Think of it. Someone has little to no experience of custom cooling. They have a stock heatsink. They buy an after-market heatsink and it comes with a pre-applied paste. They fit the heatsink and immediately see a huge reduction. This is because of the heatsink.

Then, the cooling starts to degrade alomost certainly because of dust.

They know they have a great heatsink so believe that Antartic Alumina 2009 is going to be their saviour.

They remove the heatsink and clean off the base while also cleaning out all the dust. Remembering the lessons from the first time they fitted the heatsink, this time, having carefully applied the bare minimum of paste to their cpu, they then fit the heatsink much better than the first time and with a properly fitted nice clean sink and paste applied to the cpu instead of the heatsink, they see massive difference and credit the paste.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I see your point. my load temps were getting frighteningly high, so I cleaned my case of dust and it cut my load temp by 20oC!:eek: After that I made a point to give my case a spring clean much more often. Also, experience comes in handy when applying thermal paste. As I've mentioned before, I wont be using the line method anymore as I feel it left me with way more paste on the CPU than I needed, therefore insulating heat. Lessons learned! :)
 
I have a feeling dust killed my last mobo.
My lanboy case has no filter and It never got a clean out. It was rotten inside.
Don't really want to add a filter so I guess I'll be keeping on top of it from now!
Just ordered As5 off fleabay for £4.65 delivered. A small price to pay for my peace of mind.
 
Last edited:
Cob said:
MX-2 is better than AS5.
So what do you use then?
Click to expand...

I have a tube of AS2 which still has some life in it, I have some Arctic Ceramique I got free with a SlitEdge block, some AS5 that came with a GTX block. I bought the AS2 but the others were freebees.
 
Like someone said earlier, it depends on which heatsink you buy. Recently i've been using Arctic coolings MX-2 which is meant to be one of the best pastes out there, and now im using the one i got with my Noctua heatsink the NT-H1 i think its called. In tests it was just as good as the MX-2 so some companys give you good pastes. Either way the two i've mentioned are a lot better than AS5
 
mx2 is worth it, but i would recommed running it first with standard, and seeing the temps. If you are not temp limited, leave it be.
 
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