Best thermal paste?

[Guest]

What's a good brand of thermal paste I should use? (Non liquid metal) for an i7 4790 and a cooler master hyper 212 evo fan and heatsink.

 

[Snowsnooks]

See this thread -> http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/360490-28-best-thermal-paste-lowest-temps

 

[Xtergo]

The most popular one is of course arctic silver 5 but some people are not satisfied according to Intel the Shin-Etsu X23 would be the best solution. I got some cheapo cooler master compound that i am happy with.

 

[Gam3r01]

Most pastes perform within a few C of eachother.
AS5 used to be a widely recommend paste, however with its cure time and now lackluster performance, I dont recommend it.

My personal recommendation is Arctic MX-4 (Note arctic, not arctic silver) cheap overall, great performance, and quality.

 

[blowupsheep]

Yes arctic silver- on agoogle search I have indeed found out a great deal about this company. Something about Astroturfing or something.

Arctic silver (in my own opinion) is no longer a viable solution as with today's performance based CPU's AS5 cannot cope over an extended time period mainly due to its viscosity I think.

For example the more liquid a compound it is the more UNRELIABLE the same is over a reasonable length of time. Thus why you need to re-apply it every 10 months or so. After this time performance loss occurs due the liquid binders evaporating due to the heat-thus creating free space holes and no contact.
However high viscosity compounds like shin-etsu and such last longer.
In thermal pastes people ALWAYS miss out the second half of the equation and that is performance and reliability OVER TIME. Most just feature performance and when reliability is just as important.

 

[sharndowg]

This is a good review of 39 different pastes > http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/thermal-paste-performance-benchmark,review-32804.html

 

[scout_03]

i would go for mx2 or mx4 since they do not need cure time and do a good job http://www.arctic.ac/

 

[Karadjgne]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/thermal-paste-performance-benchmark,review-32804.html

Definitely a good read, as is Part1, if paste is any concern

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Most pastes perform within a few C of eachother.
AS5 used to be a widely recommend paste, however with its cure time and now lackluster performance, I dont recommend it.

My personal recommendation is Arctic MX-4 (Note arctic, not arctic silver) cheap overall, great performance, and quality.

Yep MX-4 works great for me.

 

[Karadjgne]

I like the Noctua and Gelid Extreme 3 pastes, so far I've found them to be about the easiest to use and they spread well

 

[cbryan89]

Best? Not sure, but I've been using arctic silver on all my builds for awhile and I've been super happy with it. No issues at all.

 

[Karadjgne]

Personally I'm not a huge fan of AS5, I find it a little hard to work with and most don't understand that it's burn time is @200 heat cycles, which is simply @200 max temp burn ins not @200 times the pc is run. That's also not mentioning it's also conductive, so spillover is a concern. The only reason it got so popular is a few years back, when good pastes were quite expensive, AS5 flooded the market with Uber cheap paste that held its own vrs the good stuff in temps. As it stands now, most good pastes are of an equitable price to AS5, yet work better or at least apply better and are non-conductive. That's not to say AS5 is bad, per se, but it is pretty much firmly in the middle of the range. There are better, easier TIMs for the same price or less.