
Thermal Paste Round-up - yread
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thermal-paste-comparison,5108.html
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crispyambulance
The "summary and conclusion" says the key thing: it doesn't matter much which
paste you're using.

Proper application is far more important: No gaps/bubbles, seated with proper
pressure, thinnest possible layer.

I've had success in a production environment with the arctic silver 5. This
was for a switch fabric IC that can hit 200W, forced-air-cooling through a
vapour-chamber heatsink. FWIW other pastes worked fine too, but the factory
preferred working with viscous compounds.

~~~
overcast
My beef with arctic silver stuff, is that it's electrically conductive. Not
that I've ever run into an issue with it, not something I would risk on big
production pieces.

~~~
crispyambulance
Well, it does have silver particles in it.

However, these are in a colloidal suspension. The stuff does not conduct. I
know because I had the same concern and I tried to measure it. Moreover, the
voltages that something like this is likely to come into contact with is on
the order of 1V for BGA packages upon which it gets mounted.

Proper application, of course, mitigates the rest of the concerns about this
material.

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taco_emoji
It may be my work proxy and/or ad-blocking extensions, but I frequently have
issues with Chrome choosing the wrong character encoding with pages on
tomshardware.com, resulting in a page full of gibberish, like this:
[http://imgur.com/a/0YrWb](http://imgur.com/a/0YrWb)

Reloading the page always fixes the problem. Anybody else have this issue?

~~~
r1ch
That looks more like you're getting raw gzip content - perhaps your proxy is
messing with the Accept-Encoding headers or trying to ungzip content for
inspection and somehow messing it up.

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aidenn0
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut seems to be the standout paste after cross-
referencing; it's an "8" for usability, and is the only 8 or above usability
rating I could find in the top ten of both the low and high pressure air-
cooling tests.

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mmagin
Always amuses me how there's heat sink compounds sold to the PC enthusiast
market and they're completely different brands than you'd see stocked by a
traditional electronics supplier.

I recently had to resupply myself with heatsink grease for non-computer uses
so I got a boron nitride grease (Chemtronics CW7250), having been told that
it's the best truely non-conductive material, short of the toxic beryllium
oxide. I recently also used some reassembling the heat sink on a modern CPU
and it seems to work just fine.

And liquid metal alloys seem like a stupidly risky thing to use.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _boron nitride_

Very hard materials tend to be very good heat conductors.

Diamond would be slightly better, probably.

~~~
mmagin
Yeah, I have noticed it appears in some of the PC enthusiast materials, I
wonder why it has not received more widespread industrial acceptance.
Obviously it is very abrasive, but I think tiny synthetic diamonds aren't that
expensive. Maybe it's so far down the scale of diminishing returns to not be
worth it?

~~~
tristor
Diamond is used in some of the higher end thermal pastes and they do perform
marginally better than alternatives, but the problem is that they tend to
cause micro-abrasions caused by the high-speed vibrations ICs do. This isn't
too big of a deal when you're mounting a cooling block to an IHS surface, but
if you're doing direct-to-die cooling (which many hardcore enthusiasts do) it
can spell disaster.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Well, boron nitride should be almost as hard and abrasive as diamond. I'm
guessing it's just the law of diminishing returns that works against diamond
here.

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tristor
As has been the case for a number of years now perf/$ the best choice is
Noctua NT-H1. While there are better TIM on the market, they tend to be more
exotic which requires special care during application or have specific
lifecycles where they must be re-applied. Alternatives which perform better
are also more expensive.

I've been building extreme-performance enthusiast systems for more than 20
years which has included using about every sort of exotic TIM you can imagine,
including all the various types of liquid metals. Noctua NT-H1 is my continued
go-to and the numerous benchmarks of TIMs continues to provide strong evidence
that for the money you can't beat it.

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squarefoot
Call me old-style, but I still use the traditional white silicone based
thermal paste. It might not be the best product where top efficiency is
desired, but it won't deteriorate over time: I've removed TO3 transistors from
30+ years old equipment and their white thermal paste was still soft to the
touch. Some of the silver/gold ones I tried in the past with CPUS (before
going back to the old one) would become solid and deteriorate in a couple
years max.

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cadr
I wish they would have included Desitin (baby rash cream). I've seen it
recommended to use in a pinch and wonder how it stacks up. (I've used it on
little homebrew radios, and it seems to work, but I've never gotten around to
comparing how it works against 'real' compounds.)

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SippinLean
Turns out mayonnaise performs just about as well as Arctic MX-4:
[http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/wp-
content/uploads/tcr9-g1.gi...](http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/wp-
content/uploads/tcr9-g1.gif)

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omgtehlion
small tip: if you have a rough time applying liquid metal, try using cotton
swabs. You do not even need to roughen the surface.

