Best Of Socket A Coolers
Now you all must know about thermal paste that sits in between your CPU and the heatsink. Thermal paste is the solution to make sure that the total surface of the CPU die contacts with the cooler. No matter what the outer appearance looks like, most CPU’s will not make full contact with the heat sink if there’s no thermal paste. Don’t ever plan on installing a heavy duty cooler and think that you can ignore on applying thermal paste. You’ll end up frying your CPU.
Only now have manufactures identified the significant impact a good thermal paste base can do to overclocking. Until a few months ago the only available thermal paste were the white colour Silicone compound. These came in many varieties, were very cheap and were an average performer. However when it comes to extreme overclocking these Silicone based compound simply cannot transfer heat to the heat sink effectively as required.
The solution? Arctic Silver II.
This is the latest thermal compound to hit the market. Based on a mixture of silver, the results of this grease are simply astounding. Arctic Silver LLC. a few months back introduced the Arctic Silver, and soon after some improvements, introduced Arctic Silver II. We mentioned what an improvement is achieved with the use of this compound in our Celeron Cooler guide, however now we take a look at an AMD processor, the most heat producing CPU’s in the market. We take our AMD Duron 700 to 1000Mhz and take a look at the comparisons between Silicone Compound and Arctic Silver II.
Remember even an improvement of 3°C can make a huge difference in overclocking.
The cooler used in the above tests were a low end sollution by Cybercooler. I guess it goes unsaid how important it is to get Arctic Silver if you really plan on turning at CPU into a working horse. However it doesn’t come cheap. A 3g tube of Arctic Silver costs around $9 at Coolerguys. This’ll be adequate for many applications, so it’s well worth the investment. If you plan on investing for one of these heavy-duty coolers we’re about to look at, remember to buy one of these tubes as well.
