The HardwareLogic Thermal Compound Round-Up

[onebxr]

Another thing about Tom's marathon reviews, when I read them I read the first and last page and that tells me pretty much everything it took them 4,000,000,000 pages to say. I may be in the minority but man those things are epics. I think that War and Peace was shorter.
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[theburan]

I dunno, the unabbridged version of les miserables is pretty long... but it also gets it's ideas of much better, lol! (good book, I'm reading through it now... i've read the abbridged version before, but now the unnabridged... 2+mb word file, lol, 1500 pages of win.)

Still, I don't understand why they would be using such a bad thermal paste... were they really too cheap to get something else?

[Capper]

Sometimes putting together an article is much harder than you might imagine.

When I first started this article, I wanted to use the stock INTEL cooler.....but after testing a handful of compounds, I realized that the HSF was so poor that it was going to be a limiting factor during testing....so I had to make some changes.

I'd like to say that as long as the testing platform is the same across the board, that the thermal paste doesn't matter, but I think the comparative we did here kinda disproves that theory. I think when testing hardware, you need to remove any other factors which may affect the results.....in our case, we tested with a very good cooler to make sure it would skewer the results.

[polobunny]

Ah that's why the Intel factory HS wasn't in the results/tested. Makes sense really.

[halutzparilla]

awesome and detailed review... and i can see my 8800GTS nasty stock HSF lol...

[oldman_gamer]

OOPS....sorry Ron...good job! Wasn't aware till I read more posts that you were in on it as well.

[Yellowhello]

Wow, excellent job! Extremely informative, and I love the fact it's so compact and easy to read.

[Reloadron]

Originally Posted by oldman_gamer

OOPS....sorry Ron...good job! Wasn't aware till I read more posts that you were in on it as well.

Thanks but it was Rich who really did all the hard work. I am guessing he is still seeing paste in his sleep.

The article really does shine. I mean it really has a considerable amount of data and leaves the reader to decide.

Ron

[oakdad]

I liked that artical so much I had to join up to these forums.
I wanted to ask if you where to rate how easy the top 5 thermal paste where to apply how would you rate them?

[Capper]

The OCZ FreeZe, Arctic Cooling MX-2, and Tuniq T-2 were all very easy to work with....the ICD7 was bit tougher only because it was much thicker and a little more abrasive. I also think people will tend to not use enough of the ICD7 because of how we have become used to applying thermal compounds, follow the directions closely.

As to the article, it was almost 3 weeks of extremely tedious work. Every paste was applied at least 3 times with each cooler, six time total (at a minimum), if there was any discrepancies in the temperatures I saw, the whole test with that particular compound was rerun to ensure consistency in testing.