[nextpage title=”Introduction”]
Following up on our Thermal Compound Roundup – September 2011 review, we are adding five more thermal compounds to our roundup, for a total of 45 different models from Akasa, Antec, Arctic Cooling, Arctic Silver, Biostar, Cooler Master, Coolink, Deepcool, Dow Corning, Enermax, Evercool, Gelid, Glacialstars, Masscool, Nexus, Noctua, Prolimatech, Scythe, Shin-Etsu, Spire, Rosewill, Thermalright, Thermaltake, TIM Consultants, Titan, Tuniq, Xigmatek, Zalman, and ZEROtherm. In this review, we will determine if certain products are superior to others. We will also try another “alternative” thermal compound to see if it works.
For a better understanding of how thermal compound (a.k.a. thermal grease or thermal paste) works and how to correctly apply it, please read our How to Correctly Apply Thermal Grease tutorial and our article What is the Best Way to Apply Thermal Grease? The most important concept that you must understand is that it is a mistake to think that the more thermal grease you apply, the better. The thermal compound is a worse heat conductor than copper and aluminum (the metals usually found on cooler bases). So, if you apply more thermal compound than necessary, it will actually lower the cooling performance instead of improving it.
Figure 1 shows the five new thermal compounds that we are adding to our roundup.
Figure 1: The new thermal compounds included in this roundup
Let’s get a closer look at the new contenders in the next pages.
[nextpage title=”The Thermal Compounds”]
We will now examine the five new thermal compounds that we are including in our roundup.
Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the Thermaltake TG-1 gray compound.
Figures 4 and 5 show the ZEROtherm ZT-100 thermal compound, which has a gray color as well. This thermal compound comes with a “finger condom” that you can use to spread the thermal compound on the CPU. However, in order to do all the tests with the same parameters, we applied this compound with the “small dot at the center of the CPU” as in other tests.
[nextpage title=”The Thermal Compounds (Cont’d)”]
We also tested the Arctic Silver Céramique 2 white thermal compound, shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Arctic Silver Céramique 2
In Figure 7, you can see the Akasa 455 gray thermal compound, which was also used with the Akasa Venom Voodoo CPU cooler.
Figure 8 reveals the Masscool G751 gray compound.
Here we go again to the kitchen looking for an “alternative” thermal compound; and there was the mayonnaise jar, staring at us. Well, we tried it, as you can see in Figure 9.
For a detailed look at the other thermal compounds included in this roundup, please read our “Thermal Compound Roundup – September 2011” review.
[nextpage title=”How We Tested”]
We tested the thermal compounds using the same testbed system that we currently use to test CPU coolers, which is fully described below. Our Core i7-860 (quad-core, 2.8 GHz) CPU, which is a socket LGA1156 processor with a 95 W TDP (Thermal Design Power), was overclocked to 3.3 GHz (150 MHz base clock and 22x multiplier), and we kept the standard core voltage (Vcore). We used a Zalman CNPS9900 MAX CPU cooler. The only different part in each test was the thermal compound itself.
We measured temperature with the CPU under full load. In order to get 100% CPU usage in all threads, we ran Prime 95 25.11 (in this version, the software uses all available threads) with the “In-place Large FFTs” option. For each test, we applyied the same quantity of thermal compound (about the size of a grain of rice) at the center of the CPU, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Applying thermal compound
After each test, we checked the base of the cooler, making sure the quantity of thermal compound was optimal. The thermal compound must be spread evenly on the metallic part of the CPU, without exceeding it, creating a
thin layer. The “fingerprint” shown in Figure 11 illustrates that the compound was properly applied.
Figure 11: CPU “fingerprint,” showing the thermal compound was correctly applied
Room temperature measurements were taken with a digital thermometer. The core temperature was read with the SpeedFan program (available from the CPU thermal sensors), using an arithmetic average of the core temperature readings. During the tests, the left panel of the case was open.
We also tested the system with no thermal compound on the CPU.
Hardware Configuration
- Processor: Core i7-860
- CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS9900 MAX
- Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD6
- Memory: 2 GB Markvision (DDR3-1333/PC3-10700 with 9-9-9-22 timings), configured at 1,200 MHz
- Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB
- Video card: Point of View GeForce GTX 460
- Power supply: Seventeam ST-550P-AM
- Case: 3RSystem L-1100 T.REX Cool
Operating System Configuration
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Software Used
Error Margin
Since both room temperature and core temperature readings have 1 °C resolution, we adopted a 2 °C error margin, meaning temperature differences below 2 °C are considered irrelevant.
[nextpage title=”Our Tests”]
The table below presents the results of our measurements.
Thermal Compound | Room Temp. | Core Temp. | Difference |
No Thermal Compound | 26 °C | 88 °C | 62 °C |
Zalman ZM-STG2 | 24 °C | 59 °C | 35 °C |
Prolimatech Thermal Compound | 24 °C | 56 °C | 32 °C |
Cooler Master Thermal Compound Kit | 23 °C | 58 °C | 35 °C |
Evercool EC420-TU15 | 22 °C | 57 °C | 35 °C |
Spire Bluefrost | 22 °C | 58 °C | 36 °C |
Gelid GC Extreme | 26 °C | 61 °C | 35 °C |
Coolink Chillaramic | 26 °C | 61 °C | 35 °C |
Deepcool Z9 | 26 °C | 61 °C | 35 °C |
Noctua NT-H1 | 26 °C | 61 °C | 35 °C |
Thermalright The Chill Factor | 26 °C | 63 °C | 37 °C |
Antec Thermal Grease | 24 °C | 58 °C | 34 °C |
Arctic Silver 5 | 24 °C | 57 °C | 33 °C |
Arctic Silver Céramique | 24 °C | 57 °C | 33 °C |
Biostar Nano Diamond | 22 °C | 57 °C | 35 °C |
Xigmatek PTI-G3606 | 22 °C | 55 °C | 33 °C |
Antec Formula 7 | 21 °C | 55 °C | 34 °C |
Arctic Cooling MX-4 | 21 °C | 56 °C | 35 °C |
Cooler Master High Performance | 22 °C | 56 °C | 34 °C |
Thermaltake Thermal Compound | 21 °C | 54 °C | 33 °C |
Tuniq TX-3 | 22 °C | 54 °C | 32 °C |
Shin-Etsu MicroSi | 14 °C | 49 °C | 35 °C |
Scythe Thermal Elixer Scyte-1000 | 14 °C | 49 °C | 35 °C |
Titan Connoisseur Platinum Grease | 14 °C | 49 °C | 35 °C |
Evercool Cruise Missile STC-03 | 14 °C | 49 °C | 35 °C |
Rosewill RCX-TC001 | 14 °C | 53 °C | 39 °C |
Pink Lipstick | 14 °C | 54 °C | 40 °C |
Arctic Silver Matrix | 12 °C | 50 °C | 38 °C |
Evercool T-grease 800 | 13 °C | 49 °C | 36 °C |
Gelid GC-2 | 13 °C | 50 °C | 37 °C |
Prolimatech PK-1 | 13 °C | 47 °C | 34 °C |
Tuniq TX-4 | 12 °C | 48 °C | 36 °C |
Toothpaste | 13 °C | 53 °C | 40 °C |
Toothpaste (12 h after) | 13 °C | 56 °C | 43 °C |
Cooler Master ThermalFusion 400 | 13 °C | 47 °C | 34 °C |
Evercool Deep Bomb | 13 °C | 47 °C | 34 °C |
TIM Consultants Thermal Grease | 13 °C | 48 °C | 35 °C |
Dow Corning TC-1996 | 13 °C | 49 °C | 36 °C |
Nexus TMP-1000 | 13 °C | 50 °C | 37 °C |
Spray oil | 13 °C | 53 °C | 40 °C |
Akasa 450 | 14 °C | 50 °C | 36 °C |
Enermax (Dow Corning TC-5121) | 14 °C | 47 °C | 33 °C |
GlacialStars IceTherm II | 14 °C | 49 °C | 35 °C |
Rosewill RCX-TC060PRO | 14 °C | 56 °C | 42 °C |
Titan Royal Grease | 14 °C | 52 °C | 38 °C |
Chocolate | 14 °C | 89 °C | 75 °C |
Arctic Silver Céramique 2 | 13 °C | 48 °C | 35 °C |
Akasa 455 | 13 °C | 49 °C | 36 °C |
Masscool G751 | 13 °C | 49 °C | 36 °C |
Thermaltake TG-1 | 13 °C | 47 °C | 34 °C |
ZEROtherm ZT-100 | 13 °C | 51 °C | 38 °C |
Mayonnaise | 13 °C | 48 °C | 35 °C |
In the following graph, at full load you can see how many degrees Celsius hotter the CPU core is than the air outside the case. The lower this difference, the better is the performance of the thermal compound. The red bars refer to the compounds included in this batch.
[nextpage title=”Conclusions”]
The big surprise of this month was the performance of the mayonnaise as a thermal compound. It worked superbly, showing better performance than some well-known high-performance thermal greases. Again, we cannot determine how long it should remain effective, but in the short term, mayonnaise was the best alternative thermal compound we have seen so far.
All the “true” thermal compounds we tested this time performed within the normal curve. We can highlight that the Akasa 455 had the same performance as the Akasa 450, and the Arctic Silver Céramique 2 performed worse than the Céramique older model.
Please keep in mind that those results are valid only for the hardware we used, and with a different situation with different CPUs and cooler models, the thermal compounds can behave differently.
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