What is your favorite thermal compound? I have for the longest time used IC Diamond. Currently I use thermal grizzly. I don't know which of the two I have used is better as I have only used grizzly on my ryzen setup. My intel rig is the Diamond and my FX is diamond.
Whatever came with my Hyper 212 honestly. Haha.
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Thermal paste is thermal paste.
I've used a few types of Arctic, a couple Cooler Master, Noctua, Phanteks, Cryorig, Shin Etsu, and even some generic compounds and have never noticed much of a difference between any of them.
I say just go with the cheapest thing that's not toothpaste or peanut butter and it'll work fine.
Artic Silver 5!
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I've got a couple syringes of Noctua NT-H1 lying around because I've built with only noctua coolers for a couple years now.
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I have a few tubes of Shin Etsu Micro-Si laying around. Got them for pretty darn cheap. Not sure it's the real deal but it certainly performs as though it is.
That low cost white stuff. Usually nextech branded because its cheap.
Back in the day we had to buy thermal paste, and now it comes attached to the heatsink... so thats what I use.
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I like Arctic Silver 5. Not extremely expensive and good enough.
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I have used the paste that came with my phanteks cooler.
But i think its pretty much the same stuff as Noctua NT-H1.
There isnt really that much of a diffrence between the most well known and used thermal pasts.
So pasts that come with the coolers as standard are totally fine.
No. No no no no...
I have Nocturnal NH-D14 cooler. I used the cheapest generic stuff. 61C max no matter what...
I got myself Arctic MX2 - 49C max CPU load, 30% fan speed...
I live Arctic products. MX2 I got for couple Euros, so no. Don't go for the cheapest generic stuff. Get something decent, like Arctic MX2...
You must've missed the
part.
Spending a few bucks on adequate thermal compound will be perfectly fine in almost all situations, spending a lot of money on traditional "top tier" compound is just a waste of money. I use Arctic MX2 as well, but when it comes down to it I'd buy the cheapest stuff that's not the Shenzhen Special. Since a good majority of thermal compounds perform similarly and all.
Which after a quick search through Newegg seems to be MX2 ironically enough. It's like 0.68 g/$ compared to the Tuniq TX2 at 0.46 g/$, or Cryorig CP7 at 0.47 g/$.
I've seen benchmarks out there on various sites like Tom's hardware and each one seems to show a difference of 1-2° for most of the main, decent quality brands. Going with a cheap paste might get you as much as +10-20° so best to stick with name brand quality but unless you are overclocking and trying to get as much headroom as possible, it doesn't seem to matter all that much.
I used this compound for a long time:
It's always worked really well, it's a decent price and it spreads under the heat sink very nicely. Recently though, my local Best Buy didn't have that compound and I really needed more paste for a computer I was building so I went and purchased this:
It's...fine. Honestly it performs about the same but it's much thinner than the Antec one and it made application a bit of a mess. I've gotten used to it now, but I would much rather go back to the Antec one (which I will once I run out of the TG-7).
I bought a tube of Arctic Silver 5, like 6 years ago and I still have some left.
It's not like I use it very often and it still seems to work well. I bought it because my old GTX 465 was overheating. I only saw a few degrees (5?) better when replacing the Nvidia TIM.
Intel i5 - 4690K @ 4.5GHz with a Thermalright Macho rev. B cooler set to a very quiet fan profile
= 40C at idle, 70C when rendering 3D images (a much harsher load than most tests).
I use the completely unapproved and WRONG application method of combining Wet and Glob. First I take a very small amount of grease and firmly rub it into both the CPU and the heatsink with a gloved fingertip, to wet the entire surface of scratches, gaps and pores with a micro thin layer. Not enough to see or work as TIM. Then I do the rice grain glob method. And no, I'm not applying too much or having it ooze out of the sides. By wetting first, I usually get nearly full coverage (even though I know you only need to cover the strip in the center).
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I prefer Leaf lard or a mix of duck fat and coconut oil for pastry, sunflower oil for frying and sautes. The rest is a range.
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Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion, grease is the way we are feeling.
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I use Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra for dies and Gelid GC-Extreme on stuff like VRM components which require a nonconductive TIM. I find it kind of funny that people still buy Arctic Silver 5. Sure, it works and I've had it on my Q6600 since 2008, but nowadays there are better alternatives for pretty much the same price. If you're an enthusiast building a new PC and paying (relatively) a lot for large air coolers or AIOs - not to mention custom loops - it doesn't make sense to me to cheap out on the thermal paste. Running your chip(s) a few degrees cooler can mean potentially longer lifetimes for the components, lower noise as you can turn the fan speeds down or just more overclocking headroom.
Just don't go applying liquid metal TIMs on any heatsinks with aluminum baseplates. All of those (Coollaboratory Liquid Pro and Liquid Ultra, Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut and Phobya LM) are indium-gallium (+ other metals like tin) alloys and gallium eats through aluminum. Makes for interesting demonstrative videos on YT.
I've been using Arctic MX-4 for a minute now but I tried some noctua on another build and its pretty good too. Before that was Arctic Silver 5. Sometimes I'll just leave the stock stuff on cause I'm lazy.
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MX-4. I am running a shitty 4770K which needs 1.225 volts to run at 4.2GHz and still goes up to 85+ degrees C with a Swiftech H320 360mm rad (not delided). If you are looking for 2-4 degrees cooler go with the liquid metal stuff and spend 4 hours trying to spread it onto the heatsink and cooler, or have to wait for curing time on some other stuff (eg ceramique)... Just buy a cheap paste that has been tested and known to be within 5 degrees of the super, most expensive shit out there..
I don't think anyone in the enterprise industry is worried about insignificant things like this. This is really what you have to learn from the youtube channel. If it is cheap, easy to clean off and it just works then just use it. All the rest is really about the company that produces the stuff to get richer. Don't be the guy that has to have the best gear if you have to pay an extra 50%+ for it..