Guru3D Thermal Paste Roundup - Round 2 (2021) - Introduction

Thermal Paste Roundup 2021
TIM Mega Roundup p.2 - Which one to pick from the fresh batch of (ten) pastes?

Introduction

It has been almost two years since we made part 1 of Thermal Paste Roundup. You gave us good feedback for it; thus, we have prepared the second round of that article. As a short reminder - you should already know that the TIM (thermal insulation material) is often overlooked when setting up the PC. Thermal paste is a compound that helps to fill the gaps between the CPU and a cooler that your eyes can't spot. Most users will choose the pre-applied paste or the one provided with a cooler, which should be good enough for the CPU's stock frequencies. The bigger a load of a processor is, the better paster would show its advantage. The last roundup was prepared in 2019. Now we have two years later and a head full of ideas to make it even more interesting than last time. First, let's go over the contestants for today's review.

• Alpenföhn Permafrost 2
• Arctic Cooling MX-5
• Cryorig CP5
• Cryorig CP7
• EVGA Frostbite 2 Thermal Grease
• Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut
• Thermal Grizzly Carbonaut
• Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut
• Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme
• Zalman STC9

As you can see, we have grabbed ten new contestants (last time it was 20), most of them were delivered by OcUK. With that additional batch, we should cover almost all essential products of this sector. But's that only the beginning. What's new? We've added the CPU temperature value and, most importantly - the Delta's (as the ambient temp could vary in a range of ~1 degree Celsius). The next thing, we've expanded the list of used CPUs. This time we didn't use the Intel Core i7 8700K@4.8 GHz with 1.3V applied. But to be able to compare the efficiency of the new contestants, we've used the Intel Core i9 9900K@5 GHz again using the 1.35V. That's not all. This time around, we've checked some other CPUs. One is the Intel Core i9 10850K, but the most crucial change is the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. For those two ones, we didn't test all of the pastes from the last round (mainly due to the time frame), but still, you'll see the most important ones, including Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, Noctua NT-H1, Arctic Cooling MX-4 or Gelid GC Extreme. Isn't that cool? (also literally, haha). At first, let's have a standard introduction page about the thermal pastes as general and then the description of testes products. Results will, of course, also follow.