After all these years this still remains the king

After all these years this still remains the king.

Nah, not even close. There are plenty of newer ones like MX-4 that perform better, have no curing time and cost fuck all.

Except it really doesn't. Long cure times, electrical conductivity, and not even top of the line performance mean it should be a hard pass unless you've already got a tube of it lying around.

>electrical conductivity

AS5 isn't conductive. That's about all it has going for it though.

>Long cure times
Let your PC run 24/7 for 9 days with a couple of reboots in between and you're set.

>electrical conductivity
If you're sloppy/inexperienced you shouldn't handle delicate electronics in the first place.

AS5 + cure time still results with the lowest temps.

*teleports behind you*

heh, nozhing personal herr user

>AS5 + cure time still results with the lowest temps

That's a complete lie though. It performs worse than many newer compounds with no cure times. And it sure as fuck doesn't even come close to Coollaboratory's liquid metal solutions if you want the absolute lowest temperatures (though those ARE conductive).

So which paste is the best now then?
And I want something like AS5 that lasts a long time and is easy to remove from the cpu/cooler.

...

MX-4 has the best performance, especially relative to it's price, GC Extreme is if you like dropping more $ than needed for a barely-noticible upgrade, PK-1 is cheap and works almost as good as MX4

AS5 was hot shit back in the days of the Core2 and Athlon 64 X2, when people also bought Zalman coolers for performance, but it hasn't been the best for a long fucking time, and cruises off of it's reputation more than anything. The curing time takes a while for the impatient, and it needs replacement every couple of years due to it's formula. The pastes listed above work instantly, with no performance dropoff. I've had the same MX-4 application on my 4790k for two years now, and it works just as good as it did when I first put it on

Liquid metal pastes are niche cases that probably don't apply to the cooling setup the average user has in mind, since it destroys anything remotely resembling an aluminum cooler, and have more of a benefit if you plan on delidding

>it needs replacement every couple of years

Source? I've had AS5 on CPUs for 5+ years and I haven't noticed any degradation.

I'm using Arctic Silver 5 right now in my Thinkcenter, Thinkpad, and FagBook Pro. Works great. Got two tubes for 10 dollary doos.

>After all these years it turns out that it's not very difficult to make a malleable, thermally conductive material and the heat transfer will always be bottle-necked by the radiation mechanism, not by conduction. So you might as well buy anything with name recognition that is guaranteed to not be cheap Chinese shit.
ftfy

Your effort would be better spent removing the IHS from the CPU, and mounting the heatsink directly onto it. It would be preferred that you just solder the CPU directly to the heatsink, forming a direct silicon-metal-metal bond.

Basically the best "normal" pastes only beat it by 1-2 degrees.
The "special" ones beat it by 3 degrees, but most people wouldn't want to use those (and I'm not sure they'd want to use some of the "normal" ones either, because longevity is questionable).

though the differences are greater at higher temps

Pffft

Aftermarket pastes are a meme

I'm sure there's a pretty big difference between the cake that Intel slathers onto the heatsink and someone who properly allows a dot or line to spread, introducing less air bubbles.

does this shit have a shelf life? I bought some a few years ago but never actually used it

I'm not sure. It's so cheap that I just buy it when I need it.

>Costs twice the price, no performance gain
linus tech tips shill

you are all the thermal paste equivalent of wine snobs.

> this is a piquant, fragrant and full bodied paste
> low curing time, good adhesion, medium thixotropicity

wait a second u fuker wat does that mean?

> it means it's a non-newtonian fluid, you pleb.

>not using 1mm arctic thermal pad cut to the proper size

Niggah whatchu smokin, i reckon it takes 8 hard hours of cpu work to cure. Even then it doesnt matter cause it is already the best thermal compound made.

The best way to cure it quickly is intermittent load. Heat up the CPU, run it that way for ten minutes, shut the load off and let it cool for ten minutes, repeat for a day or two.

That said I don't get why people make a big deal about AS having a cure time. What do you care if it takes a few days to get a degree C or two better? If you know you're gonna be changing CPUs a lot in the next few days then you use cheapass zinc-oxide crap anyway just to save a few bucks.

>the cake that Intel slathers onto the heatsink

Have you even seen a stock heatsink?

>pads

Back in 2009 I wanted to replace the thermal paste in my PS3 since It needed a through out cleaning as there was a construction rework done to my street which lifted tons of dust for weeks.


I didn't wanted to pay shipping just for a $10 tube of thermal paste so I went to a local TV repair and electronics shop and asked the owner if he had some thermal paste he could sell to me

He wiped out a box full of Shin-Etsu thermal paste tubes, which he apparently gets directly from the manufacturer, I dodn't ahve to say what happened next.

I bought a bag full of tubes for a few bucks, they only have like .5grams which is enough for like 2 applications and I have been using those since that time, doing it yearly for my CPUs and GPUs.

They will probably expire before I get to use them all.

>Graph doesn't start at zero
Not misleading at all. Also, that'd make the best paste there only slightly better than mayonnaise.

wrong

>he hasn't taken the peanut pill yet
real shame 2bqh

I've used MX-4 for a long time and then just some grey chink shit one and really didn't see much difference in temps. Both worked equally good cooling an OCd 2500k with a 212+

>moving the bar that much
I assumed the bottom was double artic silver not less than 10 shit graph desu

GD900 4 lyfe

Just a reminder.
>who properly allows a dot or line to spread
This is just your delusion. Anons are not good at anything, so they would like to imagine themselves good at spreading lube.

i've been using semen. last month i had to roll out 20 new desktop machines in a week. it was exhausting.

Wow, so funny.

>Comes free with every noctua cooler

Isn't one load enough for at least 10 machines?

I don't really care about 2 degrees difference.
But I do care that a paste lasts a long time (like, 10 years), because re-applying heatsinks isn't fun.
Gelid GC Extreme is supposedly the best in many tests, but I read that it starts deteriorating and forming bubbles over time. So that makes it pretty much useless.

which is better

as5 or mx3?