Arctic Silver 5 vs Arctic Ceramique

[Ðrзω™]

Today i decided to finally invest in some Arctic Silver 5 for my cpu today (long overdue hehe i know) and i also invested in a high performance north bridge cooler due to my overclocking needs (i say needs more wants lol) but my question is: The heatsink for my northbridge comes with some Arctic Ceramique, now, would i be better to use the ceramique on my northrbridge, or the arctic silver 5? Or will there be not much of a noticable difference?

Thanks in advance for any help

[Nerwin]

I would go with arctic silver 5

[ripken204]

use the as5, the ceramique is still good tho

[Nerwin]

Yeah AS5 is good never had a heat issue again.

[teqguy]

Ceramique's particles are more densely packed than Arctic Silver's, but because of Arctic Silver's thermal resistance, they tend to perform about the same on most tests.

What would be nice is if you could filter out the aluminum oxide, boron nitride, and the polysynthetic oils to just end up with pure silver. You could then take the particles and add it to the remaining AS to end up with a thermal paste with a higher density of silver.

Another thing to consider is that there's a slight loss in efficiency of heat transience when you're dealing with multiple materials... so OCZ's copper thermal paste might be worth a shot too(provided you have a copper heatsink, of course).

Edited February 4, 2006 by teqguy

[glent]

AS5 eveytime

[Ðrзω™]

thanx for the advice everyone i'll go with the AS5 on the northbridge will keep the ceramique as a backup

@tegguy: thanx for the advice on that i may look into the ocz copper paste when i upgrade to 64-bit as my northbridge heatsink is pure copper and i'll probs be investing in high performance heatsink & fan for cpu on next upgrade. thanx

[unrealhippie]

Having used both products, I would say ceramique. I think its much easier to apply and more importantly for me with frequent installs, much easier to remove.

So for me, ceramique.

[teqguy]

One more thing to add: remember to use them sparingly.

Thermal paste is only supposed to act like a micro-filler for any imperfections in the heatsink, so a thick layer is unnecessary and might even hinder your performance.

Furthermore, people make the mistake of thinking "It's pure silver paste, silver has higher thermal resistance than copper, therefore applying a lot of it should help", but as I mentioned above, there's a penalty in thermal transience among different elements.

Granted, this penalty is far less with silver to copper than if you were going from aluminum or nickel to copper, but elemental purity could still prove to outperform Arctic Silver.

As for unreal's comment, is it just me or does Ceramique tend to get gummy over time?

[Ðrзω™]

nps had a look anyways at the as5 guide, attatching my northbridge heatsink 2moro when my new motherboard arrives 2moro (now if only i can get £115 spare to buy a Opteron 144 lol)

[jcarle]

Ceramique's particles are more densely packed than Arctic Silver's, but because of Arctic Silver's thermal resistance, they tend to perform about the same on most tests.

What would be nice is if you could filter out the aluminum oxide, boron nitride, and the polysynthetic oils to just end up with pure silver. You could then take the particles and add it to the remaining AS to end up with a thermal paste with a higher density of silver.

Another thing to consider is that there's a slight loss in efficiency of heat transience when you're dealing with multiple materials... so OCZ's copper thermal paste might be worth a shot too(provided you have a copper heatsink, of course).

Um... particle densities have NOTHING to do with it. The differences are with the efficiency of heat dissipation and conductivity between the different materials.

Also, if you had PURE silver as your heatsink base, you'd most likely cause electical interference to whatever you wether trying to cool.

[teqguy]

Actually, particle densities have everything to do with it.

Thermal paste acts as a conduit between the IHS and the base of the heatsink, compensating for any imperfections in either.

The more densely packed the particles are, the more material you have to conduct heat through, and thus the higher the efficiency, when compared to other materials in the same area.

If you think volume has no effect on heat transience, you're sadly mistaken.

[jcarle]

The primary factor in determining the effectiveness in the use of a thermal compound is it's thermal conductivity. The electrical resistivity of the combined elements used to create the compound determine it's suitability to be used as such. A pure silver compound first of all would be impossible to use since pure silver would make a solid metal and second of all, pure silver would not allow much if any electrical resistivity therefore creating electrical distortion within the processor's core.

The particle density is completely irrelevant. The importance of the gap filling properties of the compound on a microscoping level are far outweighted by the the importance of the heat transference properties of the compound. Even if you could create a compound that filled every microscopic hole on each of the surfaces (which would be nearly impossible), the point would be null if the heat transference was low. It's much more effective to have a compound with extremely high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity then it is to have a compound that "fills all the gaps" and has none of the important properties.