okay, so thermal paste. This is something that's come up quite a bit, actually, in some discussion forums that I've joined sort of anonymously. So, I've actually joined a lot of PC Enthusiast groups on like Facebook, in Reddit, and a couple of other forums and such, just to sort of see what people are talking about and outside of the YouTube comment arena, if you will. And the subject matter about thermal paste comes up quite a bit. So, I figured I would take five of the leading brand-type thermal paste, if you would, and actually do a shootout between these five and see whether or not there's any measurable real performance difference between, say, some of the most expensive and cheapest thermal paste that's out there. Today's video is brought to you by the new, really super cool Jus sense melty connector shirt. You know, paying tribute to one of the best designs that's clearly ever existed. And if you don't like the vaporwave colors, we've got our OG gray-red colors available now.

so get yours by following the link in the description below. Nice, I have a thigh cramp, so these results were actually kind of surprising. I think we've all heard that thermal paste can be up to five, six, seven C difference between them, and that could be true, but what's really an indicator of maybe a performance impactor here is going to be the thermal paste application. Because if you don't get full coverage on your IHS on your CPU, and this doesn't matter if it's AMD or Intel, then you can have hot spots on that IHS or areas that are not getting full coverage over the die itself. That could lead to hot spots with specific cores that could then lead to throttling of those individual cores, and then you start getting sporadic performance, which could look like you're getting some sort of performance uplift by using one paste or another. So today, we didn't focus specifically on the application of the thermal paste or the way that we apply it, which is either the rice method.

or the Pea method, or the X method, or the paste, you know, the full-like icing-like a cake method. I just chose the cake icing method because that's what I use around here. It guarantees that I get full coverage. Yes, it's a bit messy. Yes, it's a bit, I don't want to say wasteful, but there is quite a bit of paste that will get squished out and end up in a moat around your CPU. But at least when I do that, I know I'm not leaving any corners or any areas of the IHS that don't necessarily get touched. The problem is, as CPUs have gotten bigger, so have the IHSS, which means you need a lot more thermal paste to make it all the way out to the edges. Now, with AM5, AM4, and older Intel sockets, anything prior to 1700, they were just squares. So, you could actually get away with a circle and get a nice even spread pretty much all the way out to the center. But the problem is, as we moved on to the new

1700 socket that 12th gen, 13th gen, and 14th gen is that because it's a rectangle. You don't get a full spread all the way out to the outside unless you use quite a bit of thermal paste, and then you lose a lot off to the sides. So, that's one of the reasons why I also use the spatula to do like a paste or a frosting of the CPU IHS. So, here are the five PCEs I decided to use, and there was a couple metrics I sorted, decided to sort of like zone in on here. One, it's going to be price per gram. Two, it's going to be how much do you, I mean, what size are the tubes that you can get them in. Obviously, they come in different sizes, but ease of use, ease of installation, ease of cleaning, and how long it lasts before you have to change it. Because you can run a test in a day, the thing is, if it's only lasting a month or two before it dries out, cracks.

and you have to replace it. Then, obviously, the price per gram is exponentially more expensive as you're changing it more often. So, the longevity of it and how easy it is to apply and clean up are other factors that I'm thinking about here when I talk about the thermal paste on top of just its cooling performance. So, first up, we have the ever-popular Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut. This is not the Kryonaut Extreme, which is the pink stuff, which we were using with our EXOC or Extreme Overclocking. This is just the regular old stuff. The Kryonaut comes in the... So, this particular tube I couldn't find on Amazon. This is Amazon pricing as of the end of August 2024. Anyway, the 1G tube is... Anyway, the 1G tube is $9. $9. $9 a gram. Although, you do get a couple alcohol swabs, and you get a little rag, and you get the spatula, and you get the tube itself, and some instruction cards, and

all that sort of stuff, so you're getting more than just the paste, but n bucks puts this as the most expensive on the list for today. So, this is like the king when it comes to price, currently in a bad way, 'cause King to price would be like the best for the price, but this is like the most price. So, does it give us the most performance? Right under that, which would arguably be like one of the most popular thermal pastes for me personally, is a Kingpin KPX or the KPX Extreme. This is the baby blue stuff. It looks like blue shop towels. We've been using this pretty much exclusively in all of our builds and GPUs and stuff, or water-cooled builds, because it lasts forever. It doesn't crack, it doesn't dry out, it's easy to apply, it's easy to clean. It's literally all those things. Now, this exact tube, a 3 G tube, comes in at 19 bucks. So, that's what this equates to gam-wise right here. Next up, we're going back to some OG.

stuff. This is the original Arctic Silver 5 from Arctic. Supposedly, it was made from real silvers, so not exactly the most non-conductive thing. So, that's one of the reasons why we've moved away from this type of actual metal-infused thermal paste. Just like icy Diamond had real diamonds in it. Diamonds aren't conductive, but diamonds also aren't cheap. But anyway, um, so this was like the original kind of like if we use metal 'cause Metal's conductive. When we put the metal in our thermal paste, then the metal will be more conductive for heat. As long as you don't get it on anything that's also conducting electricity, you should be fine. So, I threw the OG guy in there. The Arctic Silver comes in at a 12 G tube, or this exact tube is 20 bucks. So, it's actually the best cost per size ratio of the group, but it's also the most old school of the group as well. But more modern from Mar Maric Maric extreme, not so the Arctic mx4. This is their more

modern non-metallic um compound, and it is definitely much more affordable at a 4G tube at $7. So, I think that might actually make it the most affordable. I'm not doing the math well in my head right now, but Phil's putting it on the screen, I'm sure. So, the mx4 is a 4G tube at $7. Even bucks, actually, I think makes it the most affordable on the table right here. And then we have the GED GC extreme. This is a 3.5 G tube at $10 on Amazon. So, these are the five samples that we were using right here. Let's go ahead and talk about the ease of installation before I show you the temperatures. Arguably, the Arctic Silver 5, or the AS5, is the most difficult to apply at room temperature. It is extremely thick. It actually reminds me of the original thermal Grizzly stuff that used to exist that you had to actually warm up to get it to flow out of the syringe easily. I should have used a heat gun on this to get it to come out.

of the tube nicely, and then heat it on top of the CPU to get it mushy enough to be able to paste it. Otherwise, the P method would have been fine, but because I'm pre-spreading it, I had to heat it to be able to spread it. I also want to point out that before I show you the charts in a minute here, all of these thermal pastes were given time to burn in. All of these thermal pastes will have a slight phase change with them, which means as they are at room temp, they are a different viscosity than they are when they are under heat and load conditions. Under those heat and load conditions is when they can actually sort of liquefy and fill in all of those micro cracks and channels and non-perfections, peaks and valleys that exist between your cooler and your CPU IHS, which is exactly what thermal paste does. It fills those gaps so that you get conductivity from every bit of surface area on your IHS and your cooler. That way, you have no air

pockets in there. They may be microscopic air pockets, but they still don't transfer heat; they insulate. So, that's why thermal paste exists. But the AS5 needed the most amount of time, in my opinion, to be able to actually phase change to give us good results. And you'll actually - we'll kind of see that on the chart. Kingpin Extreme, in my opinion, is among the easiest to work with. It's thin enough in the tube that you can apply it easily at room temperature. You can easily frost the CPU like a cake, and you get pretty good phase change under temperature without squishing out the sides. 'Cause the problem is, if you go from too thick to too thin and too watery, then it will actually squish right out the sides, and then you're left with, over time, thinning of your paste, which means poor conductivity, which means poor temperatures over time. So, if you notice that your temps get hotter and hotter and hotter over months of use with your PC, whether it be your

GPU or your CPU, you could be dealing with the squish out. That's just what I'm calling it, squish out, which is where your paste has now created a moat around your CPU rather than staying between your CPU and your cooler, which is what you want. But it's not so liquidy and goopy that it's getting everywhere as you're trying to apply it, or you go to pull it away and it strings everywhere, which is what we actually dealt with with the MX4. The MX4 is the most liquidy of the group. In fact, on our chart right here, which we were just applying it to a piece of paper, it has the biggest grease ring around it, if you will. I don't know what the substrate type material is in there that it's being suspended within, but it's the most liquidy with the biggest ring around the dot, the dot that we put on the paper. So, I want to point that out, and as you're done, you actually have to sort of like

pull the plunger back to suck the excess back inside the otherwise when you go to pull it away you'll just leave a string like right across your motherboard. It is definitely the most liquidy of the group. Thermal Grizzly um is a lot like the kpx although a little bit thicker um. It's not blue it's gray. They only they're all gray except for the the Kingpin extreme but this one here also comes in with a a built-in spreader cap that you can put on there so as you're applying it you can apply rows of it almost like a marker to your CPU um. I did not do that with this because I wanted the same exact application for every single one of my past so I use the spatula for all of it um but the thermal Grizzly doesn't leave strings or gops as you're trying to take it off so it was actually pretty easy to install without getting excess mess everywhere and then the gella GC extreme uh it's a lot like it's kind of

a mix between the mx4 and the Kingpin. It's fairly pasty, if you will, but still liquidy enough to where it flows out and doesn't leave too many strings. But if you're not careful and you push on it, um, it'll start to flow kind of slowly because what's near the tip starts to solidify because of the air that has access to. But everything up inside stays liquidy, so it's almost like a butt plug that just shoots out of there and then it craps all over your CPU like Taco Bell. So, I just want to point that out right now that if you're not careful and you're applying too much pressure, as soon as that butt plug is out, everything that butt plug was plugging comes out with it. Now, regarding cleanup, uh, the four minus, so five minus Arctic Silver, these four because they're all... I don't know what the suspension material is, what the compound is actually like, its base is... It's all easy to clean up with isopropyl alcohol. Just

get it wet on a blue shop towel or a coffee uh filter or something. It'll wipe up nice and easily. Um, reapply a couple of times and then all your thermal pce is off without having to scrub the Arctic Silver 5. Because again, it's got silver metallic dust in there, if you will. It's like literally trying to clean up poop. I don't. It's like, you know, you wipe and you wipe and you wipe, still poop. It's the same thing with this stuff. I wipe and I wipe and I wipe, still silver. And it doesn't matter how much alcohol I put on it. It didn't really seem to matter. So this was the most difficult to clean up, and it literally felt like you were scraping a turtle head, if you know what I'm saying. All right, enough bad analogies. Almost said enough bad analogies. Enough analogies. Let's just get right to the charts. Let's get to the anal analysis. So the testing methodology, it's my 14900 k.

at the 253 wat Intel um extreme profile. It's got my Arctic no plug no sponsorship cuz I know there's two Arctic stuff right here uh 420 freezer 3 uh aiio which is if you haven't checked out that video I highly recommend you go and check that out. It is pretty eye-opening as to how radiator size with aios matter and how it actually affects voltages, temperatures, and frequencies over time. Anyway, enough plug of that. I'll put a link down in the description below if you want to do and check that out. So I'm running that same AIO. This is a temperature-controlled room at 73° Fahrenheit. So you might notice the temperatures are slightly higher than they were in the AO video. That's because that day I had the room locked at 70° fenhe. Today it's at 73. So a few degrees higher. We've also shown that ambient temperature increases 1: one with the component temperature. So if the ambient goes up 2° C, the component

temperature goes up 2° C. It is a perfectly linear curve with the ambient, and then this is with the, uh, we're monitoring the CPU package Temp, and this is with the occt 15 minutes avx2 instruction set. So, that was our testing methodology right there, and you can see on the surface if we have our charts basically expanded 0 to 100 C, which is the temperature range of my 14900 K, that it's very difficult to actually see on the surface which one is performing the best. Now, this, the way the avx2 instruction set works, is it's kind of a different sort of load cycle. It's not just one constant load; it sort of fluctuates, so you'll see the temps are going up and down a few degrees, but if we take a look at the highest spikes, we can see that actually the one that's spiking the highest more frequently is the Arctic mx4. Now, when I say spike, I mean it's about 2 C above the other.

spikes, if you will. But if we were to take a look at the charts one and zoom them in, you can see the spikes and the lows a little better. So, you can see the lows are actually, and that's our lowest temperatures, is actually our kpx extreme, which is the Kingpin slga Stu, and the highest is the mx4. Now, the other three really do just literally land in between, and this is kind of surprising. I sort of expected the as5 to be the worst-performing here, but I guess it's not that surprising that it's not the worst-performing because it does have actual silver dust in it, which gives us some more potential thermal conductivity. But you really have to look at these lines individually to sort of see what's going on here. And if we were to put just the kpx and just the mx4 on the screen right now, I can tell you right now the Delta between the highest Spike on the mx4 and the highest Spike on the Kingpin extreme.

is 3C. So, it's a 3C difference between the highest temperature spike of the highest average temperature thermal paste on our chart versus the highest temperature spike of our lowest averaged thermal paste temperatures on the chart. So, what you're really kind of seeing here is that the temperatures that you're getting initially when the thermal paste is new is not the only thing you should be considering on what makes a thermal paste the best. It really plays into the other things that we've talked about, like I said, ease of installation, how much do you get in the tube, how easy is it to clean, and most importantly, how long does it last. As I already stated, and as we sort of just show the charts going slowly across the screen as we talk about this here, you can see that they all follow the same trajectories. They all have the same kind of a hump in the middle, which is that part of the AVX2 instruction set. They all come down at the same temperature. They all started around the same, and

drop to around the same. It would be impossible to blind taste test, just see temperatures and say which thermal paste is doing what. But I can tell you right now that there are certain positives and drawbacks to all five of these on the table right here. First, let's start with the Arctic Silver 5, which has gone from being the king to almost the most non-recommended thermal paste in the industry. It's because it does have a level of conductivity to it, and that's because it does have metal. It's kind of the same argument that takes place with liquid metal today, which is like the evolution of something like Arctic Silver, where now that we're just using actual liquid metal, where it's just metal that's liquid at room temp, not Mercury though. The problem is longevity. This lasts quite a while, but the fact that over time, liquid metal can sort of move and migrate with temperatures, especially if it's vertical, which can cause problems later on. But we're not talking about liquid metal today; we're talking

about thermal paste. The Arctic Silver 5 will last quite a while, and it goes through the biggest phase change, in my opinion, of any of the five on here. It goes from nearly rock hard when you go to apply it and it's at room temp, to very, very liquidy and malleable, malleable, liquefiable under heated conditions. In fact, after I ran the test and I let it cool down a little bit and I took the thermal paste off, or the cooler off, it just looked like grilled cheese coming out of there, and it got everywhere. I forgot about that aspect of Arctic Silver, so I'm like, Frick, I just got silver traces all over my boards. I had to clean that off, and I did, and it was fine, but it goes through a massive phase change. Now, phase change just means what happens to it under different temperatures or pressures, right? So, in this case, we're talking temperature at room temp is very thick, under load when it's up against a very hot CPU like the

14900k, it gets very liquidy. Now, what can happen as the paste gets liquidy is you have a lot of pressure, have a lot of mounting pressure between your cooler and your IHS. So, that means that your thermal paste is constantly being compressed. So, as it goes through that phase change and it fills in all the highs and lows between the imperfect surfaces, it will start to migrate itself to the outside because the pressure is a 360 pressure as it's being applied down. So, it will move its way to the outside. The problem is if it goes under that sort of phase change and a very wide phase change from very thick to very thin under warm temperatures. Eventually, it can start to work its way out, and that's where you start to get higher temperatures. Unfortunately, the GED GC extreme is the most migrating thermal paste we've pretty much ever used around here. In fact, Phil used to use it quite a bit until we realized he was starting to every few months deal with extreme.

temperature changes in his system because nearly every milligram of it was moving itself off of the IHS completely out the side. It is so liquidy already, and then when it gets warm, it practically turns into a very, very thin viscous fluid. And so then it, as fluids move, it just moves itself right out. And then, unfortunately, although it performs very well when new, it does not perform very long before it has migrated and squished out of your setup. So we don't recommend the gallet extreme or the G GC extreme around here for that very reason. The mx4 might be the warmest thermal paste on the chart, but the mx4 is still one of the most cost-effective thermal pastes on the table right here. It lasts, does a pretty good job at, even though it's the most liquidy as it's coming out, not really changing too much into a thinner liquid state under high temperatures and high pressures. So although it does have some migration and it will squish out the sides, it still seems to keep

enough tension, if you will, with the imperfect surfaces and filling of the gaps to do its job. And I don't really see much of the MX4 that I've used for years now, over time, ever have to be repasted because temperatures were getting out of control. So, it's hard to argue with the MX4 on here, even though it might look like on the chart that we have to zoom in to be able to see it be above the rest. Thermal Grizzly, this is D Bower's product. Der Bow's owns Thermal Grizzly. He puts a lot of R&D into his thermal paste. Unfortunately, with it comes an extreme cost. It is one of the most expensive thermal pastes on the market without being considered exotic. Even if you looked at his Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme, which is the pink stuff, it's even more expensive. And I believe I've seen it for nearly $50 for, well, this exact tube right now on Amazon was $34. So, you get an idea of just how expensive this can be. Now, you saw the

normal stuff is still $9 a gram, so it gets to be pretty expensive because of the name behind it, unfortunately. But again, he's a staple in the OC community and the modification community when it comes to XOC. He's built quite a name for himself. He R&Ds this stuff. He has a lab. More power to him. I'm not saying it's too expensive. I'm not saying it's overpriced. I'm saying that you are definitely making an investment into your thermal paste when you go, I'm holding it upside down, when you go with Thermal Grizzly. And we've used Thermal Grizzly quite a bit. We go back and forth between Kingpin and Thermal Grizzly and pretty much all of our builds around here. So you can build with confidence and know that if you're buying something like this that is more expensive than the mass-produced stuff, I mean, it's all designed in Germany. You know you're backing an actual person behind the brand that is giving a lot of

attention to detail. Now, this isn't a sponsorship. He doesn't know I'm doing this video. This is just how much I know him and how I know his philosophies about his product. I want to put that out there. The exact same thing could be said for Kingpin. You know Vince Kingpin, the Kingpin cards like the wall behind me, you know, former EVGA XOC world champion. He's put a ton of R&D into the KPX, and this is like his legacy right here outside of all of the XOC stuff that he's done. So, my recommendations here are honestly anything other than the GED and the Arctic Silver. You might be going, Jay, doesn't really help me much. That's because if you look at the charts, it doesn't come down to the temperatures they can provide. It comes down to how well they survive and how long they last you and their value. Val. So, MX4 definitely the most value. Thermal Grizzly, it's got the most name. And I feel like KPX lands like right in the

middle of all that, so this is where you guys get a sound off down below. What is your go-to thermal paste? Is it the generic clear no-name tube that comes with your cooler, or are you going out there and buying the super expensive exotic stuff because that 2C extra you might get out of it is just that important to you at the end of the day? All of these thermal pastes performed really, really well, and they kept all of our stuff, our my 14900 K, in extreme stress test conditions with the 420 AIO under ADC at 253 Watts. So, you can't complain about that performance. All right, guys, do you think we should do a video about application methods and which one's best and which one's not? I know that one is a dead horse that's got flies buzzing around it, and the buzzers have picked all the meat off those bones, but you know what? It's still low-hanging fruit if you're in non-on-nasty horse bone carcasses.

Does what Thermal Paste you use, REALLY matter?

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