Arctic Silver - Still the paste of choice?

[Newblet]

MX4 is my favourite paste, if you have the money to shell out then the Indigo Extreme pads are better though (I suppose it's expected at £15 (for two?) though).

[watercooled]

For the extra few degrees, I don't feel they're worth it, especially considering they're as good as impossible to remove.

[Samwood]

Arctic Silver is right at the top of this comparison. But ive seen benchmarks with the MX4 performing better.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/image...hp?image=42157

[watercooled]

You can't hotlink images from that website.

I'd take TIM reviews with a pinch of salt, I know the reviewers put in a lot of effort to make things as fair as possible but there's always testing variables giving some pastes an advantage over others; one example would be mounting pressure, another surface roughness+straightness, thermal output, and so on.

[CCODEZ]

Hmm, have to agree mx2/4 is the one to go for, I still have AS5 lying about that I use and also a tube of noctua after buying there maahoosive cooler. So basically... I'd say get the cheap stuff if that will do you *or just keep the pads on with the stock heatsinks if its fresh*, if you go for 3rd party cooling solutions nearly all the time they will supply you with a sachet of their stuff, if not a nice tube of it, that would be more than sufficient.

Basically, as long as you actually USE some type of thermal compund you should not need worry lol

[ntrik]

Seems like the general consensus is that most thermal pastes are quite similar. There might be small differences in temps between different pastes, but I believe the proper application of the paste will yield best results.

[pp05]

I still use AS unless there is already paste that came pre-attached to heatsink.

It's all about how you apply it.

[wasabi]

Less is more, to the point where for the past few years I don't use any. It may take a few attempts to get the positioning/angles right, but when you do, you can't beat metal on metal.

[watercooled]

If metal on metal turns out better, you were probably using way to much or really poor paste - despite looking smooth, the metal surfaces are quite rough at a microscopic level so there isn't much contact area between the two surfaces, the TIM is just there to fill in the gaps ideally.

Unless the paste is really thick (Shin-Etsu, for example), just apply a grain-of-rice-size spot to the middle of the IHS and allow the heatsink to spread it, it doesn't matter if it doesn't cover the entire heatspreader. Spreading by hand generally just introduces loads of air bubbles and is messy.

[bokawel]

AS still good, for a while.

[FatalSaviour]

I switched to Arctic Cooling's offerings a few years ago now (now on MX-4) for reasons that have been stated by many already (mainly non-conductivity and lower price point).