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Arctic Silver 5 Extensive Review

Cooling/Thermal Compounds by jmke @ 2003-12-14

Arctic Silver 5 compared to its older brother AS3 and Coolermaster Premium (Shin Etsu). How does it perform? We test it on an Intel system, letting each compound "burn in" for 3 days.

Application: AS5

Installation & Application: Arctic Silver 5

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I first set of to find out if there was a difference in the way the thermal paste was applied on the CPU. Arctic Silver suggests the following method:

On an Intel P4 type CPU with a large metal heat spreader, put a small amount of Arctic Silver onto the center of the heat spreader as shown in the photo.

Before
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Our testing has shown that this method minimizes the possibility of air bubbles and voids in the thermal interface between the heat spreader and the heatsink. Since the vast majority of the heat from the core travels directly through the heat spreader, it is more important to have a good interface directly above the actual CPU core than it is to have the heat spreader covered with compound from corner to corner.

After
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So I applied it this way, putting a little bit more compound then suggested:

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However, I found no difference in performance between using the "dot-in-the-middle" method and "spreading-out" method. But it sure makes application on the P4 very easy. If you are using an AMD you still need to spread it out manually.

All the "extra" compound is pushed out of the heatsink-CPU sandwich!

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