Thermaltake Epoxy resin as heatsink paste

[purefire2]

Hello. I'm new to this forum, not new to system building. I was refurbing an old machine earlier this week and ran out of AS5 and had none to reapply to my CPU. I did, however, have some Arctic Silver Premium Silver epoxy that I wasn't using. Now, before anyone jumps the gun, I DID NOT epoxy the CPU to the HSF. I did, however, apply just the silver resin part of the epoxy. I tested the resin for conductivity also, and zero. The results were very surprising. Once I loaded to BIOS, I could see my chip idling at a very respectable temp, just as good as AS5. Under load, also respectable. The chip is an AMD Athlon II 7850 BE on the stock cooler. I can't tell if there are any negatives to this yet. I am looking for any one who has some insight into the viability of the resin as a thermal compound. Thank you.

 

[Solandri]

The role of thermal paste is to fill microscopic air gaps between the CPU and heat sink (their mating surfaces are not perfectly flat nor smooth). Thermal paste is about 100x better at conducting heat than air.

However, the vast majority of heat transfer is via metal-on-metal contact. That is about 100x better at conducting heat than thermal paste. So the role of the paste is simply to improve heat transfer, not to enable it.

Consequently, any material with a thermal conductivity higher than air (i.e. just about everything) and which is gooey or malleable enough to fill in microscopic air gaps will work. People have used toothpaste, denture cream, and peanut butter in the past. They all work. Real thermal paste just works better (or lasts longer, or won't damage your equipment over time).

The difference is not that great though. I'll spend a few dollars to get real paste, but I think spending $20+ for the "premium" pastes is a waste of money. (The exception is the metallic pastes. They have substantially higher thermal conductivity so do in fact work better. Unfortunately they also tend to bond your heatsink to the CPU.)

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thermal-paste-comparison,5108-9.html