Arctic MX-5 Thermal Compound Listed Ahead of Launch

[vegeta535]

I been happy with the MX-5. I am about to pull my CPU block to upgrade a NVMe but for the life of me can't find the tube. I found 2 tubes of MX-4, thermal grizzly paste and LM and some other random tubes.

 

[Sir Beregond]

I still drag out the big tube of MX-4 when I paste CPUs. I'm not in a place where 1-3C is going to kill me either way anymore.

Honestly, I still have some too and it's definitely a go-to. Though I have wanted to try some others too just to see. I might try some Gelid Extreme.

 

[Jsalpha2]

Honestly, I still have some too and it's definitely a go-to. Though I have wanted to try some others too just to see. I might try some Gelid Extreme.

I still have a big tube of Arctic Silver Ceramique. it lasts forever.

 

[GoodBoy]

Just built a new system about 2 weeks ago, used an IC Graphite pad. Couldn't be happier. Rated at 35W/m-k, which is more than triple what the high performance pastes are rated at. Arctic silver 4 is rated at 8.5W/m-k, the other Arctic Silvers were all less than 9 iirc. The liquid metals are rated 36 to 38W/m-k but are a huge pain in the ass, incompatible with copper or aluminum, conductive, and need reapplied annually (fuck that). The IC Graphite pads are also conductive, so it isn't surprising that the performance rivals the liquid metals. Compared to normal compounds, this pad has been very impressive.

i9-10900x air cooled with a Noctua nh-d15s (single fan), prime95, temp settles at 62C. Going to mount a second fan soon as I get the parts.

Probably some reviews someplace, you all owe it to yourselves to check it out.

30's idle, 62C all cores at 100%. These pads are really not that bad.

I don't buy the x-y-z axis... how likely are these pads "aligned" at the molecular level such that heat only moves in one axis? pfft.

Soon as I kill prime95, temp drops to 40 in only a couple seconds... heat is moving through the material very readily, and I am only air-cooling.

I'll get around to overclocking at some point.
It was some time ago that I tested it, but the old cpu/mobo, an i7-6850k, prime95 took that into the mid 80'c, maybe higher. On that cpu I used arctic silver "ceramique". Nearly as good, if not just as good as the "silver" arctic silver compounds.

Ok, so followup after about 1.5 years. I built this system April 2021:
Ran Prime95 for about 10 minutes. It took it a bit to climb this high.

Using a really old Prime95.exe but the newer one would only ever hit 93% cpu utilization.
Seems to be running hotter than it did, unless I used the other Prime95 last time.

The other Prime95:

Still quite a bit hotter than what I saw when the system was new. It would hover at 62C, but now its 79C

Edit: I wonder if I was using different fan speed settings a year ago... don't remember...
Edit2: Got the newest Prime95, ran it longer, and reset after say 3 minutes and let it run. It had spiked to 80C but only for a second. Settled on 78C

And thinking about it, I do think initially when testing I had cpu fans on higher speeds, until I finally figured out the fanxpert asus app... yup. Just set FanxXPert to "Tornado"

and the temps dropped.

Prime95 temps tend to jump around, but I was running the torture test. 74C on a fully loaded 10core cpu really isn't bad. I don't think the performance of the IC pad has changed over time, I think last time I wasn't monitoring "max" temp and just watched it for a minute and remembered one of the lul's in the prime95 torture, when remembering 62C on my post from a year ago.

I haven't tried the Extreme version, but I did try regular Kryonaut a few years back and it didn't last very long before temps started shooting up again. Maybe 6+ months. It was also pretty expensive for how much you get. Definitely was not a long term use paste.

I used kryonaut on my 3090, that was end of July 2021, so I will do a new GPU temp test soon.