Testing

To test, I’ll be putting the HSC-G against the Nano-Diamond heatpaste by Jetart, Arctic Silver 5 and Akasa 460 all underneath a ThermalTake Max Orb which is on top of an AMD 3800+ AM2 processor.

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I’ll put the paste through the normal testing procedure which consists of the following:

Let the core idle for 30 minutes with nothing running, and record the end temperature.
Start both StressPrime on both cores and a single instance of folding@home.
Let the testing run for 30 minutes and record the end temperature.

Ambient was a constant 23C.

As you can see, this is the worst heatpaste that we have reviewed. While there is only a minor difference of 4 degrees between this and Arctic Silver 5, the gap between this and Jetart’s Nano-Diamond invention is huge. With a clear 6 degree difference under load and idle there are many reasons why this has happened.

I would be surprised if the compound itself was this poor, and so I would guess that it’s the way that the heatpaste has to be applied. As its thick, it can’t be spread like thinner compounds, this means that you can’t get a consistent thin layer on your core and hence the area that the compound covers is smaller. A thicker compound also means that the molecules are likely to be bigger and hence not fit into the tiny grooves in both your processor and heatsink further reducing its heat transfer ability.

In order to test this theory, I applied Arctic Silver as a blob and then as a thin layer and there was a clear difference of 2 degrees, proving that the way heatpaste is applied affects its performance.

If you had a mirror finish on both your CPU and heatsink then the results might be different.

I quickly tested how electrically conductive this stuff was and the answer is 0%.

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