Heatsink Thermal Compounds Review Author: Alan Wong Date Posted: December 5th, 2003 Arctic Silver 5 SLRating: OCZ Ultra II SLRating: 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....... Article Navigation Introduction Comparison Performance Conclusions OCZ Ultra II Arctic Silver 5 Pages: 1 2 3 4 >> Discuss This Article

Performance

Test Setup:

• To put CPU under stress ("Load"), Prime95 was run for 1.5 hours.
• The Heatsink Fan used to test the thermal compound was the Coolermaster Aero 7 Lite at max RPM speed (~3668RPM)
• Heat readings was in a closed case environment (in a somewhat poorly air circulated case) and were read by Gigabyte EasyTune4 v1.0 and verified with Speedfan v4.09

When idling, Arctic Silver 5 keeps the CPU coolest at 47^oC, which is 1 degree less than the OCZ Ultra II. The AS5 cools 2^oC better than the AS3, and so there was not that big a gap of performance difference.

Under load, the Arctic Silver 5 proves that it is still superior in cooling and cools 2^oC better than the Arctic Silver 3. The AS5 also cools 3^oC better than that of the OCZ Ultra II compound. The Arctic Silver 3 was able to cool better than the Ultra II compound by 1^oC, which isn’t really anything big.

All in all, Arctic Silver 5 managed to cool the best during both idle and load states. The OCZ Ultra II and Arctic Silver 3 are pretty much neck to neck when cooling. This makes the Arctic Silver 5 the ideal thermal compound to use

Conclusions

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Article Navigation Introduction Comparison Performance Conclusions

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