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Heatsink Thermal Compounds Review
Author: Alan Wong
Date Posted: December 5th, 2003
| Arctic Silver 5 SLRating: |
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| OCZ Ultra II SLRating: |
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Bottom Line: For your heatsink to reach its full potential its important to use a good thermal compound. We reviewed products from 2 leading compound suppliers Arctic Silver and OCZ. How did they perform and is it worth paying a little extra, read on to find out in our official review.......
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Pages: 1 2 3 4
>> Discuss This Article |
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Comparison: Arctic Silver vs OCZ
It is stated by the manufacturers their compounds consist of silver but what we want to know is how much, and also what makes each compound different from each other. We will also factor in price with the comparision.
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Arctic Silver 3 |
Arctic Silver 5 |
OCZ Ultra II |
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Silver Content by Weight |
Over 75% |
Over 88% |
Over 70% |
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Purity of Silver |
99.9% |
99.9% |
99.9% |
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Other Materials in Compound |
Boron Nitride |
Boron Nitride
Zinc Oxide
Aluminum Oxide |
Unknown |
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Content Package Size |
6 grams |
3.5 grams /
12 grams |
3 grams |
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Thermal Conductivity |
>9.0 W/mK |
>350,000W/m2 °C (0.001 inch layer) |
8.0 W/mK |
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Thermal Resistance |
<0.004°C-in²/Watt (0.001 inch layer) |
<0.0045°C-in2/Watt (0.001 inch layer) |
>.06 C-in/Watt |
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Electrically Conductive |
No |
No |
No |
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Price |
$6 |
$5/$20 |
$6 |
Arctic Silver 3
Arctic Silver 3 is a discontinued thermal compound from Arctic Silver but is renowned for its exceptional performance in heat transfer. It contains over 75% silver by weight, which places its silver content weight roughly (and theoretically) somewhere between the OCZ Ultra II compound and the Arctic Silver 5 (no exact position can be placed since the manufacturers don’t exactly what the percentage is in each solution).
Arctic Silver 5
Arctic Silver 5 is the current and latest thermal compound from Arctic Silver and is supposedly better than its predecessor, the Arctic Silver 3. It is quite strange how Arctic Silver decided to take a leap from AS3 to AS5, instead of AS3 to AS4. As soon as I find out, I will update the review
***UPDATE 12/8/2003***
Arctic Silver replied to me regarding my question of why they decided to
skip the name of Arctic Silver 4 and decided to go straight from AS3 to
AS5. The number 4 is not very comfortable with Asians since it sounds very
similar to the word d**th and therefore to keep the interest of their
Asian customers, they decided to not name the next AS compound AS4 but to
AS5. Being Chinese myself, 4 is very badly connotated and it was a wise marketing strategy in both the customers and Arctic Silver's interest to
skip naming their Arctic Silver compound Arctic Silver 4.
OCZ Ultra II
Although not as popular as Arctic Silver for thermal compound, the Ultra II thermal compound contains silver just like the other 2 Arctic Silver (AS) Compound. One thing that makes the Ultra II different from the AS compound is that it only contains 70% Silver by weight, which is the least compared to the Arctic Silver 3 and 5. Don’t let the the big syringe fool you, it contains about 0.5g less compound than that of the Arctic Silver 5 tube. When applying the Ultra II to my Athlon CPU core, I found it not as easy to spread as the Arctic Silver.
By now, you’re probably bored as heck by all this mumbo jumbo and just want to know which compound keeps your CPU cooler. Let’s check out the results on the next page….
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