The dispersion is quite good, denoting that it is not as viscous as it seemed to us in the first instance, especially when we have not applied as much pressure as a heatsink will apply to the processor and, in fact, we have put much more thermal paste on the paper of the which we will cast on the IHS of the processor normally. For a compound that costs less than half as much as leading competitors , Phobya's Liquid Metal Compound LM offers impressive performance, often besting the the CoolLaboratory Liquid Pro or Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut in our tests. A graphics card with a much higher heat load or the HEDT/EPYC CPUs with large surface areas are better candidates for thermal paste testing.

Thermal compounds might always be compared and debated over, but the simple fact remains: PC system building needs thermal compounds to effectively dissipate thermal loads. Without them, our beloved gaming and content-producing machines would struggle to keep components cool during heated frag sessions, heavy workstation computations, or just simply browsing the web. The wipe is made of 100% Limonene extracted from citrus essential oil. This would mean that these wipes don’t have alcohol or benzenes as this substance is used in industrial applications for cleaning as it is effective and gentle on metals and alloys. Like all our thermal pastes, it is non-conductive and non-capacitive. This eliminates the risk of short circuits and discharges. In terms of specifications, the Cooler Master MasteGel Regular thermal paste has a thermal conductivity of 5 W/mk, which is more in line with a lot of other options mentioned in this collection. The company also sells a premium version of this particular paste with thermal conductivity of 11 W/mk. This paste is grey in color and its density is 2.5 g. We had absolutely no issues applying the paste on the CPU. The overall performance of the solution has also been pretty solid as we've encountered no abnormalities in the CPU temps. We've used this particular paste for many of our builds and it's been a reliable option.Noctua's NT-H1 is a super-reliable paste that has been around for years. It is regarded as one of the best with more than 150 awards and recommendations, and it's one of the best options for building or repairing computers, especially for amateurs who may not yet have a lot of experience with thermal pastes but are confident enough to use them. The NT-H1 formula also gets excellent marks for usability, with an easy-to-apply consistency. It's easy to clean when dry and is designed to not corrode. It’s no surprise that the liquid metal compounds once again sit atop the thermal comparison. Still, a 6C difference between all 15 thermal compounds tested shows there isn’t a lot of variation, even with a 360 all-in-one cooler with a push+pull fan setup for performance. For the air cooling low- and high-tension tests, we used a large Noctua NH-D15 air cooler. We created the low tension mount environment by torquing the mounting screws to 1.13 Nm (10 in/lbs).

You may have heard of thermal pads being used by many as a replacement for thermal paste. That's entirely normal because thermal pads are also highly efficient. Thermal pads are primarily used on M.2 SSD modules. As such the heatsink or the motherboard shroud covering the M.2 SSD module holds thermal pads to dissipate the heat produced by the modules. It works the same way as thermal paste, except these are solid pads as opposed to pasting or liquid solutions. We think the Thermal Grizzly's Carbonaut is one of the best options on the market. This can be used on both processors and GPUs too. The application of thermal pads involves placing the pad on top of the CPU IHS, thereby filling the gap between the IHS and the heatsink.

We are proud of our thermal pastes. With over twenty years of experience in the PC cooling market and the goal to offer first-class products at a fair price, we have developed the MX-6. The formula of the new thermal paste is based on the proven MX-4, one of the best-selling thermal pastes in the world. Our focus was both on improving performance and on versatile application possibilities and an easy-to-use consistency. Artic's Silver series is extremely popular among enthusiasts. The Silver series has also been around for quite some time now and the company has managed to keep it relevant in the space by adding newer, better variants to match the current standards. The Arctic Silver 5 is currently one of the most popular thermal paste solutions on the market. It's a high-density polysynthetic silver compound that's known to be very effective in a variety of builds. It contains micronized silver and several other thermally conductive ceramic particles to offer a high level of performance and stability. Even though a dizzying array of different thermal pastes is available — some blends have been around for over a decade — new formulations still come to market at a surprising pace. Long-time PC cooler maker NZXT recently entered the market with its first paste, the not-very-excitingly named NZXT High-Performance Thermal Paste. Cooler Master introduced a new purple CryoFuze, and Alphacool unveiled its Apex thermal paste. Cooling mainstay Corsair also has a new XTM70 blend that will be heading to our test bench soon, and Gelid has recently released its GC-4 Thermal Paste, showing that the TIM market is still thriving. As you can see, the Arctic MX-6 is the winner of this comparison, taking 0.7 degrees from the excellent Noctua NT-H2 and 1.9 degrees Celsius from the CORSAIR TM30, which is not bad thermal paste either. Of course, in terms of performance, it seems that Arctic has done an excellent job again.