Thermal Silver
When one installs a CPU into a motherboard, a heat sink is a necessary item. With today's technologies and processing speeds, a chip the size of your thumbnail can dissipate the same heat as a 60 Watt light-bulb. This heat has to go somewhere or the chip will melt...
The connection between the large finned aluminum or copper block that is the heat sink and the small ceramic square that is the CPU is facilitated by some heat-sink-grease. Recently, the use of metallic silver in this grease has become a popular thing - silver being extra-ordinarily heat conductive.
Unfortunately, some of the "silver" greases have little or no metallic silver in them.
Overclockers.com has an excellent review of the top brands:
bq. I decided to test Arctic Silver 5, Arctic Silver 3, OCZ Ultra II Premium Silver Compound, and CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease. This test was not conducted to test performance, but rather to determine if these compounds have Silver as an ingredient.
bq. All Testing was done twice, once on a jeweler's acid free 'Black stone', and the test was repeated on paper. The testing solution was Nitric acid and Muriatic acid that was pre-mixed professionally.
bq. The tests produced some very disturbing results:
bq. OCZ Ultra II Premium Silver compound and the CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease has ZERO silver in it.
And more:
bq. Arctic Silver 3 and Arctic Silver 5 were also tested and both produced a blood red color, indicating 90% - 100% purity of Silver in both Arctic Silver 3 and Arctic Silver 5. Arctic Silver's claim of, "Contains 99.9% pure silver" by my testing is accurate and of the compounds tested, only Arctic Silver products produced results showing that Silver is in fact present.
Arctic Silver is what I have always used and it works really well - just a small amount - grain of rice spread over the entire surface as thin as possible.
Posted by DaveH at January 22, 2004 10:48 PM