Arctic MX-4

https://www.arctic.ac/uk_en/mx-4.html



Any other pastes like this?

I haven't come across any paste that's aged poorly in a significant manner, so all of them?
... although most of the very old CPUs I've been using didn't need a heatsink in the first place.

Personal experience and Manufacturer's Guarantee are two different things as plenty of people have posted over the years that their compound has turned into what looks like dried crumbly toothpaste.

Most manufactures say to change the paste every 2 or 3 years but the only one i've found so far that says apply it once is MX-4 as they guarantee theirs to still be the same after 8 years.

Really? Citation needed I'd say. Sure paste can cake and also separate. But needing to change it every few years? I don't think many people does that. I've never observed any (meaningful) degradation of performance over time with any of the pastes I've used.

just a couple Examples:

Noctua NT-H1
https://noctua.at/en/nt-h1/specification


Chill Factor 3
http://www.thermalright.de/en/accessori ... l-factor-3


MX-4


As i say this thread is not about personal experience as you sometimes see people saying they are still using a 20 year old socket A pc with Arctic silver 5 while others complain of temperature creep after only a couple of years and it's like their thermal paste has vanished and left a dry square around the base of the heatsink?

What i was aiming at with this thread was Manufacture guaranteed longevity from their specifications and if anyone knew of anything that either matched or surpassed the MX-4 guarantee.

I get your point. But thermal paste is used all over the place, almost everywhere electrical components gets hot and require cooling. Saying that most manufactures of thermal paste say to change the paste every 2 or 3 years is not correct. Some niche manufactures does it, as you point out. There's always been a lot of magical thinking around thermal paste. For most people, even most here on the forum, the brand of paste matters little as does replacing the paste, other than when changing coolers and such.

<headscratch>

This is the CPU cooling section and Noctua and Chill Factor 3 are always at the top end of the reviews on the CPU cooling charts for years ,so not a niche market and at no point was the thread about a generalization of cooling electronics with thermal materials?

If i started a thread asking if anyone knows of ( manufactured guaranteed long lasting light bulbs ) it's of no help if someone says they bought a light bulb from their corner shop and it's lasted 10 years so all light bulbs must last 10 years as it doesn't give me the brand , specifications or a website i can check the guarantee?

hopefully you see my point and i'm not trying to be rude.

I enjoy this. No worries.

I understand what you are saying. Thermal paste for me is thermal paste. The stuff they sell in small expensive packages to the DIY computer person is a subset. I'm not an expert on the premium thermal compounds, they cost too much imo. I was more interested in the stuff in the past. With small naked cores the paste made more of a difference. With delidding and stuff like that paste matters. But I feel that most hardcore users like that replace the gear sooner than replacing the thermal paste. That said, achieving a degree or two lower temp with no added noise is nice for sure.

I've used Arctic Silver Ceramique for the last decade or so, the large syringes lasts forever. I quickly checked if they said anything about how long it lasts but found nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpphKzmDiJM

Above is where this question stems from for Manufacture guaranteed longevity.

No one rush out and buy these pads as it's apparently from forum comments it's just ( Panasonic soft PGS graphite ) that they have re-packaged and overpriced but i'm waiting for other reviews to confirm this.

I've used a small syringe of it, and only had to get new paste recently.

I think I've had only one instance in the last 20 years where the thermal paste needed to be reapplied over time and that was recently with my GTX 760...and it's stock paste lasted 4+ years. The Ceramique 2 on my Haswell CPU is at the 4.5 year mark and no degradation in temps. The temps using the original Ceramique on my ~9 year old e8400 were fine the last time I booted it up as well.

I can't point to manufacturer guarantees, just to my own experiences. Given the great Ceramique product lifetimes I've seen, if Arctic claims 8 years for MX-4, it'll probably do 8 years.

I seen good comments about the pads, around 2-3C higher than the best thermal paste, but taking away the application for some users and for certain heastinks that are hard to mount like Thermalright LeGrandMacho might end up better. GamerNexus in one of his videos didn't think they are that great, and being excessively hyped atm, they have some on their way and will be releasing a review once they come back from COMPUTEX, i do think they seem like a good solution for some but not for all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56LEGALV-kA
3 degrees C worse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXjZJ48tArA
8 degrees C worse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGmOrPc14Rg
Better than Mx-4

It's going to take someone like Steve from Gamers Nexus to do a proper test as personal experience from users is very mixed.

Some of the people who are going nutz that they are useless have made the mistake of using Hard Graphite Pads instead of the Soft version as obviously you can't clamp the hard ones with enough compression and apparently the Graphite of the hard ones can fracture internally making them useless.

Arctic Silvers' instructions (which have hardly changed in over a decade) make no mention whatsoever of a shelf life, or of a reapplication interval. They do talk about storage, but ultimately state that separation of the particles from the suspension fluid [quote] "...does not affect the performance of the un-separated or remixed compound."

For what its worth I put Arctic Silver 3 on a i5-3570 with stock fansink 6 years ago. I was messing around with it last week and noticed all temps (idle, gaming, and synthetic load) were all as good as the day I installed it. I personally dont think there is much credence to the whole "you have to periodically reapply" TIM, or even that they have a shelf life. Sounds like a way to get people to buy (and waste) more product.

Heck, the longevity of TIM is the reason Intel gave us years ago for them using it under the lid (to the chagrin of overlockers) instead of indium etc which apparently can have issues over time.

The more likely reason is Intel noticed micro-cracks forming near the edges of larger sized die due to stress conditions from thermal cycling and different rates of expansion between the die, TIM, and IHS. I'd site the paper, but I don't have the link handy...it is out there in pdf form on the web, though.

I would love to go back to expose dies, get rid of IHS and the soldier/paste drama

That's the point of this thread that i wondered if anyone knew of any others that buck the trend like Arctic MX-4 and actually tell people to leave it alone and are prepared to stand by their product and guarantee it as it seems to be the complete opposite of all the others i've looked at so far.

Shows how honest Arctic are.

@Abula

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNHthP7Jv7A

A new video up on Graphite Thermal Pad vs MX-4 and he seems to confirm what others have said that you need good clamping pressure on the Pad to get it close to the paste temps.

Taking Arcric Silver as one of the more prominent examples, they state of their product [quote] "Absolute Stability: Arctic Silver 5 will not separate, run, migrate, or bleed." No disclaimers. No limitations. They dont use the words "leave it alone" or "guarantee", but their statement is good enough for me, particularly when the stuff has been in circulation for around 10 years (and its predecessor, AS3, for several years prior to that) without any widespread evidence of a chronic need to reapply. Just to be sure I inquired with them and received the following reply: "Once our products are applied in a typical computing application there is generally no need to reapply the thermal compounds unless the thermal interface has been physically disturbed."

I have to imagine that guaranteeing thermal grease in general isn't a common practice because if they were to actually "guarantee" it, for any period, then unscrupulous people (and there are plenty of them out there) would abuse it. How could a manufacturer verify it was applied correctly, or if there even was a performance failure at all? They couldn't, so they'd be handing out free tubes left and right.

Arctic's Warranty statement does not specifically address MX-4 and is thus fairly generic (including a clause that defective product must be returned to them). It would be interesting to see what happens if someone called them up and said "your grease pumped out after 7 years....gime a new tube!" LOL

Thanks for going to the trouble of contacting Arctic Silver but it's not necessary as this is not a question of "does thermal paste last a long time" but a question of what brand publicly and officially advertise their product as being long lasting?

Seasonic now Guarantee their PSU's for 12 years so if i asked the question "Does anyone know of any other brand with a long warranty?" i would expect reply's like 'Corsair 10 years' etc. etc. I wouldn't expect replies such as: All PSU's are the same , I've had a generic PSU's still working after 20 years or someone that sells their PSU with a 1 year warranty telling people unofficially in a private email it really lasts 12 years?

I wish i could articulate that without sounding rude as i really don't wish to be.

lets take it as a given that all thermal pastes are the same and never need to be reapplied because it lasts decades , Does anyone know of any other brands like MX-4 that officially advertise their product for durability?

Thanks for the the link, solid results, but its worst than paste, something that was expected, but on things that i might not change over time, i might go with it. Still waiting on Steve/GamerNexus to see his tests into a more in depth testing.

No worries. I think most everyone here understood where you are coming from (I do), but I believe the broader picture, and the takeaway from this discussion, is that not only are thermal paste "guarantees" virtually non-existent, they might also be pointless. Thermal grease is not an electrical or mechanical component/assembly which you can slap a MTBF on, and it is used in such a dizzying and widely varying array of applications that the DIY PC market is something of a side-show.

Dow Corning alone makes over 60 different thermal greases, pastes, adhesives, etc (including the ones Intel uses) and to answer your question on point: NO, none of them are guaranteed for anything other than meeting the (at times very detailed) material specifications they provide.

Does that make Arctic MX-4 special? Not for me. Seems like a marketing gimmick. Arctic Silver (and possibly others) give just as much reassurance ("...will not separate, run, migrate, or bleed.")... they just dont feel the need to use a big stylized "8" on their product page. Like I said, is Arctic really going to give you a new tube if in 7 years you tell them your temps have gone up by 2 degrees?!?

<Head Scratch>

The question has nothing to do with a brand replacing their paste under warranty.



Sales gimmick or not some brands advise you to replace the paste every couple of years where as MX-4 seems to be the only one that bucks this trend unless anyone else knows of any other brand with a similar advertisement?

Pretty crap sales gimmick considering MX-4 is one of the cheapest premium pastes to start with and they just want you to leave it alone instead of buying more of it.

But your subject line says "Manufacture Guaranteed Durable...". For me, the word 'guarantee' implies replacement or other restitution if/when the product fails to meet the terms of a written warranty, so discussing exactly what Arctic means when they use that phrase seemed appropriate. But on closer examination of their website and literature, I see now that they never use the word guarantee (only the phrase "8 Year durability") so it would be misleading for anyone to say they guarantee it (a claim is not the same as a guarantee).


I've given you ample evidence that Artic is not "the only one": Arctic Silver makes the same long-term stability claim as Arctic. It is right there in their product information and literature.

Arctic says "...the performance of MX-4 does not compromise over time."

Arctic Silver says "Absolute Stability: Arctic Silver 5 will not separate, run, migrate, or bleed."

Different phrasing, but the inference is the same.

LOL , Dude you seem to be having your own conversation with your own subtext and cherry picking from your own quotes to make a point that is only in context to yourself.

My part of the original MX-4 quote is in the original first post.



I proceeded to give other examples of brands that quote a different time frame for reapplication and why the question was asked in relation to the Graphite Pad Youtube Video.

The only reason i ever asked is because there is a lot of talk around the web about these new Graphite Pads and that someone asked in a user comment if there are any pastes other than MX-4 promoting long reapplication times that i thought silentpcreview users being a knowledgeable lot might know.

This is now a pointless thread as a week has passed that i can't even remember where the question was asked even if anyone knew of any and i'm certainly not looking through 1000s of replys on this subject that is on places like Youtube/reddit/notbookreview as it's not that important to me or needs to be this complex.

If anything this thread could do with locking as none of us have kept it on topic and i'll start one that is of actual interest to me ( and Abula ) about these new graphite pads.

@Abula

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAfIglmbwgk

3 year old MX4 vs New MX4 Vs Graphite pad

In short, 3 year old MX4 had slightly higher (around 1C) core temps than new MX4. Both ran slightly cooler (again, around 1C) than IC Graphite Thermal Pad. To me it means stop worrying about old paste. And don't expect any significant temperature improvements with graphite thermal pads but use them for the other reasons such as convenience.

Thanks for the link.

I think overall the paste seems very consistent even over time, and no need to re do it, on the other hand the pad always seems sligthly higher than paste, but still not a huge thing, viable imo, just not much gain if you are comfortable applying termal paste, maybe for something really long term but im going to remain with paste for now, even though i do have a couple of ic pads now, will see if i get some time to test with the mugen5.

He said the paste had thickened to a putty yet others have said that their old MX4 was as wet and sticky as the day they had first applied it , Though i've seen plenty of people say that MX2 is thick and turns to putty , though i assume he is 100% sure that he used MX4 years ago and not fogotten.

He was using a brand new tube of MX4 so it's hard to compare to the original tube if the batches vary slightly or if any changes or improvements to the formula or is the 1c improvement something as simple as him clamping cooler down harder on the last test.

Not sure what to make of it to be honest.

Guaranteed Thermal Paste? Does such a thing exist?

Arctic Silver 5 , first time user , my Rig is sitting in the kitchen with fresh ball of paste applied.
Giving it time to set before hammering it.

Paste is sticky and thick , at the same time it's almost thin.
Good body that's for sure.

I centered the application dead square in the middle of CPU, pray it's not over applied.

I'll check in again tomorrow, post results.

Few Hours since I posted , I'm working with my computer about 1 hour.

Ceramic Gel I applied was bigger than a dime, smaller than a nickle, so... about Penney diameter.
As thick as a Dime.

Ignited computer, first time ever was Quiet.
Fans were spinning so soft, I couldn't believe it.
Of course when I began to use the DVD player and open Internet to Surf little bit, then fans opened up.

Thermal Heat was very Mild, didn't measure heat, but could feel big difference.
So... I got Lucky, the right paste, applied dime thickness and diameter like a Penney.