Best thermal interface material?

[diif]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

That sure don't make any sense

European sales. They have it here http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Arctic-MX-...item58c33a4e51

[stj]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

that's one clumsy add, look at the item specifics!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

for the best white silicone thermal compounds, try anabond and servisol. they come in big 50-100g tubes and cost only a few bucks.

[Hondaman]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

I have been using Arctic Silver 5 for years, but I don't overclock - I just surf the Net, do very basic office stuff, and that's about all. I have a tube of Radio Shack CPU paste, I probably only used it once. I still have it.

[hikaruichijo]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

I've been using the Gelid GC-Extreme for two years and it is giving better results to me than AS5 but it is a bit hard to work with it, it is to hard at ambient temperature.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

might wanna turn up the heater in your room in that case if applying thermal paste. warmer ambient temps should soften it a little, making it easier to spread with that spatula they gave.

[ratdude747]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

might wanna turn up the heater in your room in that case if applying thermal paste. warmer ambient temps should soften it a little, making it easier to spread with that spatula they gave.

I never use a spatula; I use the heatsink itself to do the spreading. Less risk of air bubbles that way.

[xelectech]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

Hey, happy holidays to all.

Thought I'd add a data point regarding the RS thermal compound - I have an AMD Athlon-64 based machine that I used that heatsink compound on about 4.5 years ago. I had to replace a few bulged caps in it yesterday and decided to redo the heatsink - the old stuff was fairly-well dried out, so it was time. I'd gotten used to the processor always running in the low to mid 40's, now it's cruising along in the low to mid 30's.

[momaka]

Re: Best thermal interface material?

So, I am interested in your long term experience with different pastes.

I am using cheap thermal compound that I bought from eBay about 5 years ago. Not sure what brand it is, but it has "HC-151" written on the label. It's a 30 gram tube and I think I paid something like $5 for it.

Basically, I decided to try it out as an experiment. It is probably the most oily and runny compound I have ever used... but it works! And when I say that, I mean it works quite well. Maybe not as good as Arctic Silver, but definitely a respectable performance .

The best part is that it doesn't matter how thick of a layer I apply. Because it is very runny, the heatsink pressure always thins it out to just see-through thickness. Thus, I get pretty good temperatures with it - both on small, exposed-die CPUs/GPUs as well as CPU and GPUs that use a heat-spreader.

Also, it doesn't seem to dry out over time, unlike some other generic thermal compounds I've used in the past (*cough* Spectra Cool *cough*). The oldest application was on an Athlon 64 3200+ CPU about 3 years ago. Last I checked it, the compound was still wet and oily under the heatsink. Didn't even bother re-applying new compound after that. Instead, I simply collected the excess on the side of the CPU and put it on the CPU heat spreader again. Guess what? Temperatures were still the same afterwards (45C at full load in a 28C room temperature, with a 500 MHz overclock at stock voltage). Compared to my other Athlon 64 systems that use the same CPU and heatsinks but with stock AMD thermal pads, I get slightly lower temperature with the cheap compound by 2-5 degrees C.

Also appears to work well even with tiny GPU/CPU dies. In fact, I just did a Radeon HD 2400 about a month ago. The temperature was about 5C lower with the new compound vs. the stock ATI pink bubble gum stuff (50-63C idle/load before, 45-55C after, both with closed case at 18C room temperature).

All of that said, though, I definitely won't say that every cheap thermal compound online is this decent. Back in 2007, I bought what appeared to be some of the first cheap thermal compound on eBay. I think it went by the name of Spectra Cool. Now that stuff was complete garbage. It was just borderline soft enough to use. I could swear at moments that it was just chalk and water. I did a few GPUs and CPUs with it too (namely another Radeon 9700 and a Duron 750 MHz s462 CPU). The compound dried on both of them within a year. The Duron 750 MHz CPU was powered ON maybe only about 3 times and did no more than 4 hours total.

On a different note, I also tried some "diamond" thermal compound before in the repair shop I used to work. My boss said to use it for the PS3, since he thought it would help with heat dissipation from those phat PS3 CPUs/GPUs. The compound claimed extremely good thermal conductivity on the box. However, I didn't like it at all. Not only was it very pricey, but it was also very thick and hard to spread. Almost about the consistency of tar. Because of that, I don't think the compound was too effective. No way to measure the temperature on a PS3, though, so I can't say for sure. But IIRC, a few did come back with overheating issues (again).

I've been using Ceramique 2. A fair bit cheaper than AS5 and unless you're doing some odd insane overclocking you won't notice a difference in temps.

I use the same as you get lots more bang for your buck and there is no real difference in performance.

Yup, AS Ceramique 2 is definitely decent stuff. Used it on many Pentium 4 Prescott HTs computers a few years back for a small-medium size office (about 40 PCs or so). No heat issues whatsoever.

However, there was another guy in that place that also did some of those PCs, and many of them ran their CPU fans at near 100%. Reason why is because he applied too thick of a layer. Ceramique 2 is somewhat thick, so it needs to be spread well into a thin layer in order to perform well. The CPUs were overheating and throttling back with the thick compound layer on there.

i would recommend arctic mx-4

That's another good one. I have a few tubes with some leftover compound from a friend of mine. It's not too runny and not too thick either - actually just the right viscosity, IMO. That said, I still like my cheap eBay compound better .

Nearly everyone in this forum has experienced the situation of CPU heatsink removal leading to CPU removal, because the cheap TIM had gone completely dry.

I've had that happen with fresh thermal compound as well. Namely, it was with a thick layer of Ceramique 2. The same guy I mentioned above had worked on the system before me.

To prevent this from happening, you should never pull up on the heatsink. Only twist and lift one corner, while simultaneously pushing the corner diagonally-opposite down. If the heatsink doesn't want to move at all, it may help to heat it up with a hair dryer for a little bit.

I've never lifted a CPU since.

Thought I'd add a data point regarding the RS thermal compound - I have an AMD Athlon-64 based machine that I used that heatsink compound on about 4.5 years ago. I had to replace a few bulged caps in it yesterday and decided to redo the heatsink - the old stuff was fairly-well dried out, so it was time. I'd gotten used to the processor always running in the low to mid 40's, now it's cruising along in the low to mid 30's.

Now that's more like it!
The temperatures for my Athlon 64 systems are pretty much all like that - at least the ones I did with my cheap compound as well.