I am about a week on the other side of a recent system build. Meaning that the new system has been in service for about a week. Why did I label this an under-appreciated item? Because without it the CPU probably wouldn't have lasted a minute. Ok, the truth is that if one is building on a motherboard built this century, then the board itself is probably smart enough to shut things down before the CPU cooks. But if one has built a system in the past year, then one knows just how difficult it is to get the core components at present. So, yeah, cooking the CPU would have a more profound and less recoverable connotation.
Enter, thermal paste. More specifically, enter one of the most recent formulations of thermal paste. I chose this one because it has significantly higher thermal transmission gradient than the best formulations available just a few years ago, and came in at half the price of its next competitor (at the time of purchase). In reality, they are all priced about the same, but many come with half the volume of stuff inside the tube. And suppose one makes a mistake the first time had needs a do-over (that didn't happen to me, but I prepared for it none the less). So, at about $9 for 4 ml; if this were gasoline it would cost over $170K to fill a 20 gal tank! The other guys were selling 2 ml for the same price so thankfully my car doesn't run on this stuff.
But not using it can spend about $200 to $20,000 (Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc CPU builds can start touching this magnitude of cash) in less than a minute. So far, I have stressed my system during video rendering and compositing on a few occasions - it's ok, that's what it was built to do. The CPU is factory rated at 90 degrees C - that's almost hot enough to boil water, but that is the factory established LIMIT. Using this paste along with a liquid-cooled thermal management scheme, my CPU has never gone above 61C during any operation to date including the most stressful. The thermal paste is the transmitter between the CPU and the heatsink. So no cooling strategy will be any more efficient than the paste will allow.
Another reason for purchasing a tube with extra paste; some builds use more than one CPU, and sometimes there's an options to provide additional cooling to the GPU. M.2 memory tends to run pretty warm and use heatsinks as well. The point being, anytime there's a heatsink, using thermal paste at the junction will enhance the heatsink's ability to cool the component - the better the paste, the more efficient the cooling. And cooler components run faster and smoother. Solid State memory slows down significantly at higher temperatures, it's called throttling for anyone looking at their first build. So I probably used less than 1 ml to install the CPU - it's more art than exact science, but having more left over is helpful if one has numerous heatsinks to treat during the build.
This paste emerged from the tube in a predictable manner - which is good considering the cost per ounce. It came with a mini-spatula for spreading. It sort of resembles a pizza peel if one were providing their pet hamster with its own pizza oven, but I digress. Spreading the paste prior to installing the CPU cooler was very easy and controllable. I was able to achieve edge to edge over the CPU without any dripping to the motherboard - nice, neat, mess-free application. There's also a rating for noise level....ok....um...this paste is pretty quiet. (Amazon asks reviewers to rate a few areas that are not necessarily presented in the public review space other than as an aggregate score).
My CPU was at 24C (room temperature) when I powered up this afternoon. It is now at 37C and hasn't gone above 43C during this session. That was probably during Windows boot up. It runs typically between 34C and 38C during low demand. I have read some reviews in which folks describe their systems as running nominally ay 70C! (Methinks these are gaming rigs under full load). So, I guess based on all of this, this paste is pretty effective. But it can only be as effective as the rest of the cooling system it supports. At least I can confidently say that it is not likely to be a weak link - and it has a rating for efficacy over 8 years! I would purchase it again - but I wouldn't fill the gas tank with it.
| Brand | ARCTIC |
|---|---|
| Item model number | MX-4 |
| Item Weight | 0.141 ounces |
| Product Dimensions | 1.2 x 2.8 x 5.9 inches |
| Item Dimensions LxWxH | 1.2 x 2.8 x 5.9 inches |
| Color | grey |
| Manufacturer | ARCTIC |
| ASIN | B0795DP124 |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Date First Available | January 19, 2018 |
