Does Arctic Silver have an expiration date?

S

Sovereign

2[H]4U
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Mar 21, 2005
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Should you use it up within a certain range of buying it? Because my paste dried up/disappeared and I believe that was what was causing my blue screen problems I posted about earlier. This AS5 is at least two and a half years old if not older, and peeling the sticker off the tube revealed a not-so-continuous color; i.e. parts of it were less "silver" and more "yellowish-grey."

Should I buy a new tube?
 
I would, but if it's not really an option, just mix it up as well as you can and it should be fine, assuming the tube has been sealed...

 
I've read reports of a tube lasting six years. It will settle out over time and some clear fluid will appear at the upright end, but the dark silver stuff should still be usable .

If the paste didn't work the first time then it's probably no good. You can try mixing it up, but I would just buy a new tube.
 
If you can mix it up again, it should be fine but you might not get a very even quantity of each material out of the tube.
AS5 is too thick to be effective unless you can really clamp the heatsink down so I recommend MX-2 paste or Ceramique if you have some laying around - its not quite as good as MX-2 though..
We get much less issues with the above pastes and they dont conduct electricity at frequency like AS5.
 
I have a partial syringe of Arctic Silver Ceramique which I purchased almost 5 years ago. The stuff still seems to work just as good as it did the day I received it.

Recently I grabbed a syringe of the MX-2 and it seems to work fine for cooling as well. I figured I would only be out a few bucks if it didn't do any good since I still had the Ceramique. I've actually been getting loaded down with thermal goop lately. I gave a friend about three syringes of the stuff from different manufacturers which I have received with different heatsinks. He occasionally builds low end systems for people and I figure the stuff which I have gotten with heatsinks lately is good enough for them if the heatsink he gets for the systems doesn't have some goop of its own. It also comes in handy when he takes someone's heatsink off so he has something to replace the goop that's on it.

 
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