Arctic MX-5 Thermal Compound Listed Ahead of Launch

The cure time with as5 was always a downer for me. I swapped cpus/gpus to often. I went through a tube of as5 and switched to ceramique mostly because i started wcing my gpus and didnt trust as5 as thoroughly as ceramique.

I picked up a $20 20g tube of mx4 last year but ill still give mx5 a try when i see it for sale. I have some old 980tis i can do comparisons on, if i can ever get parts for another rig this spring that is.
 
I still have tons of GC-Extreme and NT-H1, but sure, let's add more thermal paste to that supply lol.
you should make a vid of benchmarks between them... not a whole lot of people even know about GC-extreme becuase it came out right before derbauer dropped his thermal grizzly line and gamers nexus started pushing it hard, but really they were pushing the liquid metal that, yeah has better numbers, but also absorbs into the surfaces and is something that has to be checked/replaced annually or bi-annually at the most. GC-Extreme when it came out was best of the best. and like i was saying, the coolers i have removed after extended periods have never been dried out. just as gunky as it was day one. but nobody want's to test it for whatever reason? i would say it's at least equal if not better than Thermal Grizzly. From watching gamers nexus from time to time over the years I can point out clear bias towards certain brands/products from them. and being that his "buddy" derbauer owns grizzly you know he's gonna shill hard. he has had his head blown up like a baloon after people started calling him "tech jesus" which is gross if you ask me.
 
The cure time with as5 was always a downer for me. I swapped cpus/gpus to often. I went through a tube of as5 and switched to ceramique mostly because i started wcing my gpus and didnt trust as5 as thoroughly as ceramique.

I picked up a $20 20g tube of mx4 last year but ill still give mx5 a try when i see it for sale. I have some old 980tis i can do comparisons on, if i can ever get parts for another rig this spring that is.
add gelid gc-extreme into the mix if you're gonna be benchmarking.
 
I still use ceramique II for the most part.

Huge tubes of it are dirt cheap and I haven't noticed a measurable difference vs other products. It also lasts foreverrrrr.
 
American cheese or nothing here.
If American cheese is the "champagne of processed dairy products", what is the champagne of thermal paste nowadays? I've been using a massive tube of no-name Chinese paste and it's been working fine...
 
Once stuff was equivalent to AS5 and not AS5 I ditched it because that shit is impossible to clean off of stuff compared to other pastes.
 
Lots of good stuff out there, but I'll just put this out there the MX stuff has really good longevity. It continues to have good thermal conductance even when hopelessly dry.

If you have a device or pc with which you don't want to relube - this line is a good bet.
 
If American cheese is the "champagne of processed dairy products", what is the champagne of thermal paste nowadays? I've been using a massive tube of no-name Chinese paste and it's been working fine...
Probably Thermal Grizzy stuff - Kryonaut if you don't want to go with liquid metal, Conductonaut if you do.
 
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rubbing alcohol
Arctic Silver pastes are still annoying as hell to clean up with proper cleaning materials. That shit is flat out horrible to clean up and it's one of the big reasons I ditched that company's products at the time AS2 and Ceramique were current. Ceramique wasn't as bad to clean up from what I remember but it was still more trouble than it was worth. MX-2 and MX-4 are much easier to clean up than Arctic Silver products and they're easier to apply likely resulting in even less mess to clean up in the first place.

Considering the MX pastes work at least as well and last longer and probably cost less their a win/win/win in my book.
 
I struggle to see what good AS5 is anymore. Perhaps in a few limited situations its worth the hassle. The cure time with the old hassle of putting it on naked cpu cores back in the day meant I moved away from it back in 2007 and never looked back.

Back in the days when other TIM's were toothpaste garbage AS5 was indeed the best but yes, it boggles my mind why some insist on using that crap anymore. It is mildly conductive, has a curing time, it dries eventually and has to be replaced and even then it is only okay (by todays standard) in thermal transfer.
 
Ill give you the drying out and conductive, but MX4 has a curing time too and theres plenty of others that are better than even mx4.
 
Still my go-to for all builds.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003C2TAQI

SPECIFICATIONS
Specific Gravity: 3.2 g/cm³
Adhesiveness: 310000Cps
Thermal Conductivity: 10.2 W/m-°C
Thermal Impedance: 0.017°C-in2/W

Screenshot_20210122-074040.png
 
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that is one of the things i like about it, it stays put.

yeah its old but it still works just fine.

So does the paste on AMD's stock coolers of the past of the past 8-9 years. Since the Phenom II in my experience.
 
mx4 and as5 are my go-to's and have a tube of each on my desk. if im out and need some now, ill grab as5 locally. if im running out of that, i order mx4. i actually prefer the as5 for how it "handles", prob 'cause im used to it from using it for so long. ill try this next time, probably.
How many computers are you building that you have tubes on your desk on standby?
 
I started off using IC Diamond paste for many years. then i moved to Kryonaut. Got tired of Kryonauts inconsistency issues and switched to KPX Smurf Jizz.
 
So does the paste on AMD's stock coolers of the past of the past 8-9 years. Since the Phenom II in my experience.
yup, its decent too.

How many computers are you building that you have tubes on your desk on standby?
i build a handful a year but i re-paste all the machines i refurb for the schools, so i use a fair bit. ive used a full tube of as5 since Oct and about a 1/4 of the mx-4 tube i bought before xmas.
 
Ill give you the drying out and conductive, but MX4 has a curing time too and theres plenty of others that are better than even mx4.
I have MX-4 on two 2600x systems and on a laptop my son fixed for the father of a friend of his. There was no curing time at all on any of those three systems. Temps have been exactly the same.
 
Its nice to see some development in this arena, but it seems to be a relatively limited sphere even after all this time. It would be nice if they could develop easy to apply thermal pads that had the same performance as highest end pastes and could be used on a variety of components (ie GPU VRMs and the like).

As for pastes, ever since I got away from AS5 years ago (which unlike later ones, had both a setting and a maximum performance curing time if I recall), I've used a few different "standard" paste types. I've never messed with the non-standard "metallic, conductive" pads or liquid metals - years ago they were a big thing but had complex install methods (I remember one of them required you to run your CPU without any cooling to heat it up enough to essentially bond the liquid metal pad to the heat spreader ) and could be hard to remove , damaging if you screwed up etc... so it never seemed worth it for me. Instead, I looked at what were the top of the lines of the more standard, non-conductive thermal grease types in comparative reviews ; which coincidentally, seemed to be a lot more common over a decade ago as I hardly see these kinds of articles with much frequency these days. For a long time it seemed that the top of the lines were GC Extreme, Prolimatech PK-1, and then Prolimatech PK-3 (the latter is what I've used for my last few builds), but I'm to understand the new king of the hill is Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme which, I guess is what I'd pick up if I need more TIM for my next build. I do have to hand it to Thermal Grizzly for developing their Carbonaut and MinusPad8 enhanced thermal pads though - even if they're not up to the performance of Kryonaut yet, its still nice to see someone improving,

I don't know where Arctic Cooling MX-5 will fall in this hierarchy, but its nice to see some attempts to improve these materials
 
add gelid gc-extreme into the mix if you're gonna be benchmarking.
My benchmarking days are long gone. I was meaning in comparison to each other, mx4 vs 5.
Ive been using a tube of prolimatech pk3(great stuff) for my own gear. GC extreme and KPX are on my list of pastes to try tho.
If mx5 is as easy to use and as cheap as mx4 i may start buying that for everything else i build. A buck a gram for mx4 is going to be tough to beat.
 
just found this vid. interesting

he benches all 3 for 30 min running prime95. and one claims 50% better better thermal conductivity than the others "on paper". but will it win?
 
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Still have half a tube of original Arctic Silver. I don't use it but would love to compare it to a modern paste.
 
"Update Jan 25th: Arctic released a statement on Twitter regarding the availability of the MX-5.
The ARCTIC MX-5 will be officially released on March 15. Since there are only a few quantities at the beginning, a pre-sale will be done via Amazon and our website. Unfortunately, we cannot predict Amazon availability, so please check Amazon availability on your own."
 
Just found another vid about AS5 that you should watch if you are still stuck on AS5... and his advice at the end is golden. Just like if you watched the vid in my last post it's best to let the benchmarks speak because fayboism and numbers on paper don't always get you the best performance. Not trying to hate AS5 was good back in the early 2000's but there has just been a lot of headway and innovations made in the world of thermal paste since then.
 
Just found another vid about AS5 that you should watch if you are still stuck on AS5... and his advice at the end is golden. Just like if you watched the vid in my last post it's best to let the benchmarks speak because fayboism and numbers on paper don't always get you the best performance. Not trying to hate AS5 was good back in the early 2000's but there has just been a lot of headway and innovations made in the world of thermal paste since then.

how about you drop it and let people use what they feel like using. "not hating" lol right....
 
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