This article explores the factors buyers need to consider when choosing the right thermal compound that will give their rig the absolute best cooling performance. It improves conductivity between the heatsink and the CPU. The heatsink dissipates the excess energy produced by the processor safely away from the unit, where the heat is pushed out by the fan or some other cooling apparatus. This thermal interface material can also be applied between other components to help the system maintain a healthy temperature.
This leads to a significant improvement in thermal performance and helps to prevent overheating which, in turn, increases the longevity of the CPU.
A thermal compound works in a very simple way to help improve heat conduction. CPUs, heatsinks, and coolers have small imperfections on them that are imperceptible to the naked eye.
As you probably know, air is not good for heat conduction — and heatsinks are designed to conduct heat. The thermal compound works to smooth out these microscopic spaces on and between the surfaces, making them work in the best way possible.
The heatsink is then able to efficiently transfer the heat away from the component generating it. The composition of a compound determines its thermal and electrical conductivity, its durability, and its viscosity. Pastes are made of a wide range of ingredients including:. These are the most effective heat conductors, but they are also very electrically conductive. These are significantly cheaper, safer to use, and they provide great results. That is why they are so popular. These are pre-applied to thermal pads which are then placed between the processor and the heatsink.
So, if the need ever arose to replace the cooler, for example, there would be problems in doing so. Getting the wrong kind of paste will not only increase the PC temperature but it may also worsen its performance. These are a few factors for computer enthusiasts to consider before purchasing a thermal compound that will work best to improve the temperature, as well as the performance of their PC.
The second factor to consider is the thermal conductivity of the paste. Each thermal paste comes with its own thermal conductivity rating for how efficient it is at transferring heat from the processor to the heatsink. Liquid and non-metallic compounds have different conductivity levels. As a general rule, the higher the number rating, the better the compound is going to be at heat conduction. This will allow it to squeeze throughout the CPU easily. When choosing the right paste, care must also be taken to ensure that the paste has the right consistency for applying it directly to the CPU or GPU without risking damage to the components.
The higher the viscosity of the compound, the thicker it will be so that it looks more like an actual paste. This type of paste is typically better for sticking the heat sink compound to the processor. Compounds with lower viscosity are typically more liquid, and these tend to leak onto the motherboard easily when too much of the compound is used.
A compound with low conductivity can also be chosen to allow application without shorts, even if the paste touches any of the electrical components. The thermal design power shows the amount of power that a processor is going to use. This can be used as an estimate to determine how hot it is going to get. A processor with higher TDP is likely to use more power and, therefore, generate a lot more heat.
This is something else to consider when choosing the best thermal compound to ensure that it can handle the heat generated to keep the components safe, cool, and performing at their best. The TDP is listed on the processor specs. Even with the best thermal compound on the market, it will be next to impossible to bring down the temperature of a system if the cooling solution being used is not a very effective one.
Use only a pea-sized amount of paste. Apply it to the center in order to allow the heatsink to push the substance down onto the CPU. This is a great technique to prevent spreading the paste over the heat spreader and the method works particularly well with less viscous solutions. When using a liquid compound, apply a paper-thin layer over your CPU using just a dot of the substance on either side of the CPU.
Most manufacturers specify a shelf life of up to three years for packages that are unopened. However, that does not take into consideration the date the tube was produced. This means that even when enthusiasts buy compounds new, they may have been sitting on some shelf for quite a while which makes it likely that the compound has already degraded.
This buying guide is a great resource to use when searching for the best thermal compound to keep any system cool and enhance performance dramatically. Christian is a tech enthusiast with a strong background in computer systems and smart devices. You'll find Christian writing about computer components, electronics, smart devices, and more. He's a content creator by day and a hardcore gamer by night.
In his free time, you can find him on a number of World of Warcraft servers or capturing epic landscapes with his mini drone. We have a detailed breakdown of the best methods for applying thermal paste here. Here are the best thermal pastes, along with our complete test results. Keep in mind that you don't always get what you pay for as some budget pastes come awfully close to or overtake their more-expensive competitors.
Often hanging close to, but not overtaking, liquid metal compounds in our tests, PromilaTech PK-3 Nano Aluminum paste is a moderately viscous thermal compound integrated with aluminum and zinc oxide.
The paste provides good stability, making it easy to apply to all surfaces as well as simple to clean up. You really can't go wrong with this paste — it is sufficient for most CPU applications. Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut is a mildly viscous thermal compound with good stability, making it simple to work with while also resisting drips and runs. This paste is very easy to apply and clean up, making it a favorite among system builders.
A compound with traditional thermal compound attributes such as thick, pliable viscosity and good stability upon application. MasterGel Pro v2 is easy to work with, simple to apply and cleans up well. Technical spec sheets do not list individual ingredients. MX-5 is a new compound which does not directly replace their popular MX-4 but is a new formulation for enthusiast use based on carbon micro-particulates in what is assumed to be a silicon or silicone base.
The slight-blue tint and smooth, viscous compound has a bit more fluid consistency much like thin toothpaste making it easy to apply and cleanup which lends to very smooth and fast spreading during cooler tension, but can also be prone to dripping and running if applied on vertical surfaces.
NB Max Pro is a smooth, creamy non-conductive paste that flows well during tensioning. A screw-on cap syringe maintains compound longevity to prevent drying and is priced as an attractive paste for those on a budget. You really can't go wrong with this paste — it is sufficient for the majority of builds. Gelid GC-Extreme is a moderately viscous compound, making it very stable during application and it spreads consistently, although it requires slow consistent pressure on the syringe plunger for correct placement.
This TIM is relatively easy to use and simple to clean up. While known and listed to being electrically non-conductive, most technical data sheets refer to the chemical make-up which includes heat-conductive metal oxides suspended in what is likely a silicone base. This thick, viscous non-conductive compound has a great deal of plasticity, giving it slower spreading properties.
As a result, heatsink installation will require additional focus to apply even tension to ensure proper spread. The NTE A paste is an industrial silicone thermal compound designed for diodes and transistors in commercial and residential electronic equipment.
NTE A is silky smooth and spreads very easily. The large, 1oz Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut liquid metal thermal compound has a very thin, runny consistency and is applied to the CPU integrated heat spreader with a syringe delivery system and capillary needle applicator tip.
Excess material can be siphoned off using a special extraction tip by pulling the syringe plunger to withdraw excess liquid metal. CoolLaboratory Liquid Pro is a liquid metal compound that is applied with a syringe and capillary tip to the CPU integrated heat spreader, and it ships with a scouring pad and alcohol swab for prep and cleanup.
Application and spreading of the liquid metal are made easier with cotton swabs and generous pressure for even distribution. Liquid metal can cause reactions with some metals, such as aluminum, and some reports of reactions with copper are also documented by end-users.
Liquid Metal Compound LM ships as a syringe with a capillary applicator tip. Spreading the compound is made easier with cotton swabs and generous pressure to develop a consistent coating on the CPU IHS. Can cause reactions with aluminum and other metals. Here's a breakdown of our recent testing, and we'll be adding new pastes to this list over the coming weeks and months. A bit further down, you'll find our original round of testing with 85 different pastes, some of which we've revisited in this new performance hierarchy.
That should give you a good idea of how other pastes that we haven't retested yet would compare to the newer pastes. We'll go into our breakdown of how we test these thermal pastes below, but the key takeaway here is that a single thermal compound can perform differently based upon several variables, such as what type of cooler and mount you use.
To cover all the bases, we've tested every thermal paste with three variables:. Below you'll find the temperatures we measured on our standardized test bench, and as always, lower temperatures are better. We've also included value charts in the album below as well.
As shown in the slides above, the outcome of the different testing scenarios resulted in some interesting comparisons among the compounds.
Air Cooling — Low Tension Mount Liquid metal compounds make their way to the top of the temperature chart with slightly cooler values than the traditional pastes. Interestingly, the difference between the top and bottom of this chart is less than 4C. When we look at each compound in terms of unit cost-per-gram, liquid metal compounds are generally more costly, making their overall performance value more of a luxury than a necessity. However, Phobya LM bucks this trend as it shows you can get good liquid metal compound performance at bargain pricing.
Only a few minor changes to the pecking order have occurred, and these easily fall within the tight margins of standard deviation.
Small differences in temperatures jostle the chart a bit, but overall the more budget-friendly compounds show much more promising performance value due to relatively close load ranges. We see a trend that most good and great thermal compounds perform very similarly, but might be worlds apart in price per gram.
The performance value chart shows most of the liquid metal compounds with a poor value-per-gram rating, but once again, Phobya LM proves to be the outlier for that sub-category with its budget price tag.
Key Takeaways Thermal compounds might always be compared and debated over, but the simple fact remains: PC system building needs thermal compounds to effectively dissipate thermal loads. Without them, our beloved gaming and content-producing machines would struggle to keep components cool during heated frag sessions, heavy workstation computations, or just simply browsing the web.
Not every system will need the most expensive compound, so even the most budget-minded system builders can rest easy knowing that even lower-cost pastes can still prove very effective. You can see our historical testing results with far more pastes after the test setup. For our thermal compound tests, we use the same hardware, overclock, and configuration for each and every test to minimize environment variables in our testing.
We tested each thermal paste with a low-tension air cooler mount, high-tension air cooler mount, and a high-tension AIO liquid cooler mount. Each application was given a 1-hour burn-in using Prime95 with ten load and cooling cycles over the course of the hour; six minutes each with a ten-second cool-down between. Each testing load session was then executed for a one-hour load period, again using Prime For the air cooling low- and high-tension tests, we used a large Noctua NH-D15 air cooler.
We created the low tension mount environment by torquing the mounting screws to 1. The low tension mounting tests help simulate cooler installs that might not use a backplate like push-pin coolers or those that do not allow high tension and compression across the CPU integrated heat spreader.
Also, repeated tests are not consistently possible with push-pin mounted coolers: The pins can degrade after several mount cycles, which meant we needed to simulate these to maintain consistent test results.
Our high-tension air cooler mount involved tightening the mounting screws fully to the mounting plate and shows thermal paste performance with air coolers with backplates that allow for tighter mounting.
We performed these tests with the AIO pump block fully tensioned tightened. We didn't test the AIO with a low-tension mount because liquid coolers almost always employ a backplate that allows a high-tension mount. Overall, each compound was evaluated and stressed over a regimen cycle covering six hours with two different coolers and different mounting tensions, making for no less than 90 hours of compound testing for our initial round of tests.
Here's our legacy thermal paste testing chart that we generated back in As you'll notice, many of the same popular pastes in are still on the market, making it into our new round of testing. We do have new testing equipment for our updated tests, such as a more modern CPU, motherboard, and coolers for our tests, but we adhered to the same test methodology employed in these prior tests.
That means that you can use these legacy tests as a decent approximation of how the newer pastes compare to the older pastes, too. Included in this guide: 1. Specifications Electrically Conductive: No. Thermal Conductivity: Ease of Use: 4. Relative Performance: 4. Cleanup: lint-free absorbent paper towels, alcohol pads or cotton swabs and alcohol.
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