Hi guys,
I want to share with you a fantastic piece of writing from one of the best known German overclockers today, der8auer (Roman). Roman is what I would describe as your typical extreme overclocker (thankfully one that likes to share his findings and can write well!). His attention to detail, the amount of testing involved and dedication to find out for HIMSELF what the real story is with thermal pastes or anything to do with this hobby you know as extreme overclocking is what motivates and challenges hard core guys to stay in the game and challenge themselves in every possible aspect. This in turn provides possible months of testing information at your fingertips and helps you move on to the next challenge rather than keep the thermal paste debate going.
Good overclocker must get his tools spot on and it was nice to see Roman using the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH as platform of choice for this thermal paste test.
Here is the article recently posted on HWBOT forum. Thanks to Roman for giving us permission to share it with our readers!
Extreme-Overclockers are always trying to achieve the highest scores possible. No matter if CPU, GPU, mainboard or memory - everything has to run perfect in order to set up new records. The latest generation of Core i7 - Ivy Bridge - scales brilliantly on deep cold. Without cold bug the CPUs are limited by the pot and thermal compound. I will test 26 different thermal compounds in the following test to see how they perform with air cooling and liquid nitrogen.
Index:
- TIM Roundup 2013
- Setup and description
- Thermal compounds in detail
- Alpenföhn Schneekanone
- Coolink Chillaramic
- Noctua NT-H1
- Alphacool Silver Grease
- Gelid GC-Extreme
- Zalman ZM-STG1
- Revoltec Thermal Grease Nano
- JunPus D9000
- JunPus DX1
- Xigmatek PTI-G3606
- Xigmatek PTI-G4512
- Coolermaster Value V1
- Coolermaster Essentials E1
- Dimastech HTX EE
- Dimastech Thermal Compound
- Prolimatech PK-1
- Prolimatech PK-2
- Prolimatech PK-3
- Akasa 455
- Akasa 460
- Akasa 5022
- Arctic Silver 5
- Arctic Céramique 2
- Arctic MX-2
- Arctic MX-4
- ]Amasan T12
- Test 1: Air cooling
- Test 2: LN2 at -50°C
- Test 3: LN2 at -150°C
- Evaluation
- Evaluation of the results
- Awards
Acknowledgment:
First I'd like to thank all the vendors who supported me for this test and provided samples to me. Caseking was the most important as the provided the most products to me. Thanks a lot for that!
I also received some samples directly from vendors. Thanks to Akasa, Alpenföhn, Coolink, Noctua, Alphacool respectively Aquatuning, der8auer ECC, JunPus, Dimastech and Prolimatech.
Setup and description:
TheoryI'm sure you guys already know why we have to use thermal paste. But just in case if there are some new members out there, I will explain why you need thermal paste. So what is thermal paste and why do we need to use it?