Best non conductive easy to use thermal compound?

Soldato
Joined
6 Nov 2004
Posts
5,779
With OCUK now slowly shipping out the backlog of Ryzen CPU’s my 5900x is imminent.

I have bought everything for my build bar a thermal compound as I simply forgot.

I’m after something easy to use that’s non conductive. P rice is no issue any recommendations? I’d like something easy to work with ideally if I ever have to remove the cooler so would prefer to not use liquid metal.

Thanks.
 
Soldato
Joined
22 May 2010
Posts
11,681
Location
Minibotpc
thermal grizzly kryonaut, been using this for quite some time, stepping up from arctic silver 5.

If you want best performance though, you'll want to get conductonaut, though its abit of a bugger to apply and its very important to not apply too much.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Jul 2004
Posts
3,517
Location
Yancashire
THIS > thermal grizzly kryonaut

I've just been on a journey. Was about to buy a new AIO as my CPU temps had been getting worryingly high and I figured my 5 year old H100i GTX might be giving up the ghost. I thought I'd try some new thermal compound first though as maybe that had gone bad (after 5 years) and re seat the cooler head. First tried some old not very good compound I had lying around which was probably a very bad idea! Temps in Realbench went to 90 degrees!
Ordered some thermal grizzly kryonaut, gave a really good clean with TIM cleaner and re-applied/ re-seated again - temps are back down to mid 70's, about 80 max in Realbench. This is on a Haswell-e i7 5930k OC'd at 4.4Ghz by the way (pretty hot chips).

Long story short - do not use old **** compound, thermal grizzly kryonaut is good.
Obvioulsy I would have seen a good improvement if I'd used something else decent and brand new, but from what I've read thermal grizzly is right up there as the best these days.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2009
Posts
3,286
If you want easy to use and good performance my money goes on gelid gc extreme. 1 or 2 degrees hotter than the grizzly stuff but I've ordered the grizzly stuff twice and both times it was like clay!

Very hard to spread if putting it on a GPU or other bare die.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Jul 2004
Posts
3,517
Location
Yancashire
If you want easy to use and good performance my money goes on gelid gc extreme. 1 or 2 degrees hotter than the grizzly stuff but I've ordered the grizzly stuff twice and both times it was like clay!

Very hard to spread if putting it on a GPU or other bare die.

You must have got a bad batch, mine was nice same consistency as any other stuff I've used. There are even fakes doing the rounds at the moment apparently (the tube I got came with a code so you can certify it on their website as genuine - so it must be a thing)
 
Permabanned
Joined
22 Oct 2018
Posts
2,451
Another good one is Thermalright TF8. It's very easy to use, lasts jsut about forever and has a really high thermal conductivity.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Jul 2004
Posts
3,517
Location
Yancashire
You're going to get a lot of subjective advice, which in nice but not necessarily logical or helpful.

Lots of factors go into cooling but for thermal compound there's one basic 'fact' you can use to lock onto and help guide your purchase - the W/mk (Watts per meter-Kelvin) value it has. Here is a table from guru3d. The higher the W/mk value, the 'better' it should be....

Full article: https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/guru3d_thermal_paste_roundup_2019,1.html


Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut 73.0 W/mK
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 12.5 W/mK
Prolimatech PK-3 11.2 W/mK
Coolermaster Mastergel Maker 11.0 W/mK
Prolimatech PK-2 10.2 W/mK
Arctic Silver 5 8.89 W/mK
Arctic Cooling MX-4 8.5 W/mK
Gelid GC Extreme 8.5 W/mK
Coolermaster Mastergel Pro 8.0 W/mK
Be Quiet DC1 >7.5 W/mK
Arctic Cooling MX-2 5.6 W/mK
Coolermaster Mastergel Regular 5 W/mK
SilentiumPC Pactum PT-2 5 W/mK
Phanteks PH-NDC 4.5 W/mK
Zalman ZM-STG2 4.1 W/mK
SilentiumPC Pactum PT-1 4 W/mK
Corsair TM30 3.8 W/mK
Noctua NT-H1 n/a
Noctua NT-H2 n/a
Thermaltake TG4 n/a

The **** and old (probably out of date) stuff I mentioned I tried in my earlier post had a W/mk of only 2 I've just discovered! No wonder my temps went sky high.
The Thermal Grizzly I used now has a value of 12.5 and the temps went down 10-15 degrees, so you can work out the maths yourself as to what the values mean in real terms.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
29 May 2005
Posts
4,896
I have used silver 5, mx 4, ge lid. Currently using ge lid cos I got a tube of it. If I remember right the Arctic stuff was runnier and easier to apply.

gelid comes with a spreader which is handy. But I do the cross method now. Fair bit of the stuff spill over the cpu but it is no worries.

temp wise I think the silver 5 didn’t give good results despite what that conductivity table is saying. Silver 5 is old school paste. Mx4 and gelid were very similar.
 
Back
Top Bottom