If you are a PC enthusiast and you like building your own PC, at some point you will start asking yourself which thermal compound is the best for your gaming PC. KitGuru has put a nice comparison article together showing the temperatures with seven different thermal compounds on an Intel rig.


To compare thermal compounds you have to keep as many things as possible constant including the CPU cooler, CPU voltage, CPU frequency and room temperature. In the case of the test system the guys were using a Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force motherboard, an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU an 16GB of Corsair DDR4 memory. The CPU has been pushed up to 4.5 GHz at 1.3v, which is not a particularly efficient overclocking but generates a lot of heat. To cool the CPU a Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED has been used.

KitGuru decided to apply the thermal compound using the "pea" method, which means a small drop is placed in the center of the CPU. After each test they cleaned the surface with an ArtiClean Kit. The idle temperature is measured 10 minutes after Windows 10 finished booting, while the load temperature was taken after running Prime95 for 10 minutes. Each test has been repeated 5 times.

As we already mentioned seven different thermal compounds have been tested including the following: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, CM MasterGel Pro, Arctic MX-4, Arctic Silver 5, Silver Ceramique 2, EKWB Ecoterm and Cryorig CP15. According to the review the best compound offers 4 degrees improvement over the worst. Keeping the absolute temperature in mind, this makes for a 5% improvement by changing thermal paste. If you want to have a look at all the results in detail we can highly recommend the English article over at Kitguru.





Source: KitGuru