Long ago I tweaked my PCs
Water cooling and high end stuff
Arctic silver was the way to go
Then a completely overclocked PC with several water cooling loops and a real expensive video card was my pride and joy
It scored really high on several tests but alas it sprung a leak after half a year of operation.
While looking for what to build next I ordered a basic really cheap motherboard with onboard graphics that accepted my CPU.
It wasn’t long till I realised that despite much lower benchmark scores this setup did what I wanted and not feel slow.
So I waited a bit with ordering a new setup. I looked through my parts bin, and measured all components temps, stuck heatsinks on all that became hot.
Lol I had so much heatsinks just the silent fan of the power unit gave enough airflow to keep all cool.
Holy dang, this PC was silent and fast enough.
On top of that after half a year I received a letter from the energy company and got a refund twice asbhigh as the parts that I bought to get it going had cost me.
One of the things I bought with my order was a big syringe with cheap thermal paste
I did test it and compared to the Arctic silver it had my CPU 2°C higher at burnin tests.
But the stuff cost me FL2 (like €0,80 $1,10 ) for a huge amount where the Arctic stuff was$6,50 for a tiny amount.
I used it but it got lost during the move here, I ordered something similar for I think $1 or $2 on AliExpress and it works nice.
Just fyi, heat is measured in watts not degrees, so 2C doesn’t really say how big the difference is.
2C drop on a 150W CPU is far more significant than 2C on a 50W CPU.
Also a big reason why you pay more for high quality thermal compound is so that it can last many years without drying, because when it dries then the performance drops.
How do thermal pads rate as a comparison? We use them for led modules/cob with an output up to 4000Lm.
We also use what looks to be a metallic type thermal pad which is extremely delicate and tears easily.
Just to note, these thermal pads are used on lighting for shopping centres and are on constantly. 5 year warranty. Never had one fail yet.
May be worth a test and see how they do in a torch
Arctic silver 5 is 8.9 w/mk, the above is up to 50 w/mk or am I reading that wrong? Option to request a sample on the site. May be worth sending a sample to djozz
Often in manufacturing it is simpler and cheaper to use thermal pads.
They do work, and usually it is fine because the cooling solution is more than what is necessary.
As long as the temps are within the rated operating range there is no reason to spend more money on higher thermal transfer.
In commercial applications you only spend what you need, the rest is profit.
For people who want the best cooling possible for their flashlight, then thermal paste is better
I don’t know, but i can imagine they’ll work okay when made of aluminium and / or copper ‘foam’ like structure.
With pressure they will flatten a little or something?
holy war about the thermal paste
I almost did not overclock the CPU and I definitely have enough 3 W/M-K
The extra couple of degrees does not bother me
The problem with declaring jihot is that it would be fought out by jihotis, which sounds like something from a Playboy magazine…
I have Arctic MX-2 thermal compound, by the way. It seems fine to me, although I don’t push my stuff right to the brink the way some of the other people here do.