Arctic Silver 5 (aka Old Gray Beard) vs Arctic MX6 (aka Young and Hung) - The Big Show!

Nice to see you guys holding hands..

Get a room next time lol

Edit:

This isn't my home forum, so I see these types of posts all the time.

Use whatever gives you the warm and fuzzies :D
 
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I bought a 20 gram syringe of Arctic Ceramique (the original) about 13 years ago, and finally used up the last of it earlier this year. Every build I've done for myself, my work place, or close friends, had this stuff applied, and none of them ever reported any heat issues as long as their heatsink / cooling fans were working.

Back in January, on our HP Z400 workstations that control the NMR spectrometer workstations, I had to upgrade those ancient dual core Xeon CPU's, and got a couple of quad core Xeon's for about 20 bucks off eBay. The lower power heat sink / fans that came with those Z400's had one fewer pin connector on them compared to the higher power heat sink / cooling fans, and the systems were constantly giving me warnings that I had the incorrect heat sink installed. Another eBay shopping session found a couple of the high power heat sinks, and I used my last bit of Arctic Ceramique in them.

The Ceramique works fantastically, even though these are "higher power" CPU's that do generate some good heat. Even when I'm doing a lot of 3D Fourier transform processing of my NMR data, the CPU temps rise just a few degrees C, and the systems are running 24 / 7 / 365.

I never did get around to trying Ceramique 2, though. I would have to imagine that it's better.

The only reason why I switched to Arctic MX-4 was that I found a new tube of it on eBay for 4 bucks, shipped, and it works great on my Ryzen 9 5900X.

The way I see it, use whatever is at least decently rated, and use it correctly, and be happy.
 
Yup, any name brand TIM should work ok for you. Right now I have TF7 on and its fine. Better than fine..
 
I Just used my old mx-5 on my 7000X a couple weeks ago. Man this tube is ancient.
 
I checked all of my intake filters and they were clean, but what I didn't check was the radiator itself. I blew it out with some compressed air, and some dust did come out. Not a huge amount, but more than I would have liked. It looks like that pretty much did it. It's back to near normal now around 34-36C idle. However, I have a suspicion it was not that little bit of extra dust on the rad fins, but a Windows update. Anyway, all good now.
Well, not all good. It's still idling around 40C, even with the fan on 100%. This is strange. It's almost like something in teh BIOS started reporting the temps differently, but I haven't updated the BIOS. What I have noticed is that my cores are not dropping when idling. They stay around 3500-3800. I know they aren't running at that speed or the CPU would be getting hotter, but somehow I think this is connected to my 40C idle temps.
 
I have a big tube of as5 which I bought back in the stone age. I took have grown old.

But it's used in all my builds. Works fine. The big tube was a good investment.

If your talking about a 1c difference I'm not impressed enough to change my ways.
 
I have a big tube of as5 which I bought back in the stone age. I took have grown old.

But it's used in all my builds. Works fine. The big tube was a good investment.

If your talking about a 1c difference I'm not impressed enough to change my ways.
The whole point of the test was to confirm or not that AC5 can still compare to 'new and better' thermal compounds, at least on my 3600. I too will use all of my AC5 before buying anything else, and probably buy AC5 again :)
 
The whole point of the test was to confirm or not that AC5 can still compare to 'new and better' thermal compounds, at least on my 3600. I too will use all of my AC5 before buying anything else, and probably buy AC5 again :)

Oh I get it... I was just making conversation. It's amazing how much extra stuff I don't need to buy when I do a build these days. I hoarded all this stuff in the late 90s into the 2000s...

Zip ties. Pfft. I'll never buy them again. Thermal paste? Might never buy it again. Extra screws... Check.... Check. Check.
 
Oh I get it... I was just making conversation. It's amazing how much extra stuff I don't need to buy when I do a build these days. I hoarded all this stuff in the late 90s into the 2000s...

Zip ties. Pfft. I'll never buy them again. Thermal paste? Might never buy it again. Extra screws... Check.... Check. Check.
I know what you mean. I tossed out so much stuff a couple of years ago, 3.5" caddies, internal DVD writers, all sorts of stuff I had collected since the mid 90s. I'm also just about over the enthusiast computer thing too. My last effort was this thing:

PXL_20220503_040959279.jpg


Then I was feeling the not enthused feeling and downsized into this thing:

PXL_20230129_223604197.jpg


And my next build will be in a micro case with no lights. I'm going to mount it under my table, out of sight. This progression represents the computer side of my entire disillusionment with existence. LOL
 
I ordered 8 G tube that should last me a good 10 years. I still have my MX-4 or something 4 G tube from ages ago. This should lube up dozens of processors and graphics cards I will take apart in the future.
 
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