It does, nevertheless, bring home the fact that thermal compound is not truly a very good thermal conductor. That's why you are not meant to put it on with a trowel, folks.

Next, some plain white zinc oxide thermal goop, as offered in little plastic sachets with, or pre-utilized to the bases of, plenty of low-cost CPU coolers. I applied the white goop in the time-honoured fashion, with my index finger, and did not make any explicit effort to keep the layer tremendous-skinny. Whole copper slug covered deeply enough that you can not tell it was copper.

Unlike the PTK-001, the Nanotherm compound sticks to metallic nicely, and is simple to unfold very thinly and fairly evenly. If you're a fetishist about utilizing absolutely the minimum quantity of thermal goop necessary, then Nanotherm ought to swimsuit you very nicely. The Cooler Master HTK-001 compound appears like strange low cost white thermal goop.

I then turned the fan off again and left the heater running at full energy for a few minutes, till the heater temperature probe read one hundred°C. Then I turned the fan on again, and now the reading settled to zero.50°C/W. I tried an ultra-skinny layer of Nanotherm Blue, which is what you'd wish to use on really mirror-finished processors and coolers. The 6Cu+ is decidedly not a mirror-finished cooler, though; the smear of grease wasn't sufficient to utterly fill the ridges on the bottom of the copper slug, and the rating was only zero.fifty six°C/W. The Nanotherm compounds are much less fluid than the average, though not as dry as Cooler Master's PTK-001.

This white grease has the identical oily consistency because the silver AS3, and is simply as easy to unfold. In the actual world, over-thick grease layers are thinned out considerably by the pressure of the CPU cooler retention mechanism, a minimum of if you're putting the cooler on a small-contact-area CPU. But there's solely a lot that even the strongest cooler clips can do with the enormous pancake-syrup grease dollop that many individuals use.

By monitoring the voltage across the heater's four.7 ohm power resistor I can inform how a lot heat it is outputting. I caught a Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu+ cooler on the heater - I evaluate this cooler in my monster comparisonhere.

Much wetter than the PTK-001 compound, not as wet as the brand new-fangled non-silicone compounds. It scored 0.50°C/W, just like the strange compound it resembles. The contact patch of my un-spacered test rig is greater than the top of any CPU, so I did not use the Cooler Master software kit anyway, but simply applied a layer to the underside of the 6Cu+, as earlier than. Despite the grease's stiffness, it wasn't very onerous to get the underside of the 6Cu+ lined with a decently skinny layer of PTK-001 grease. It wasn't any harder to clean away than the other greases, either.

It's obtained a spherical copper slug constructed into its base, and the copper stands slightly proud of the aluminium round it, which made it easy for me to standardise the contact area from check to check. Slight alignment changes from taking the cooler off the heater and placing it back on must make little difference to the quantity of metallic in touch with the heater plate. To take a look at the completely different goops, I used my normal CPU-simulating heater-with-a-thermal-probe-in-it, but with out the standard copper piece on prime of it to simulate the contact patch of an actual processor. With no copper in the way in which, the heater's contact patch is much larger than that of an actual CPU, and I solely have to use one layer of goop. For those who haven't tried it (as food, not as thermal compound), it is not as bizarre as you may need heard.