Friday, 30 July 2004
Page 1 of 6 Arctic Silver
One of the products that seems to receive the least attention yet is crucial
to system performance is thermal compound. This is the material that goes in
between a heat source- like a computer chip- and a heatsink. Its job it to
transfer heat from the chip to the heatsink, whose job is to disburse this heat.
Ideally a thermal compound will be able to efficiently transfer heat but will
not be electronically conductive.
The biggest name in thermal compounds (aka TIMs or thermal interface
materials) is Arctic Silver. They have been at it for a long time and are the
most respected company in the game. Currently their two most popular products
are Ceramique and, at the higher-end, Arctic Silver 5. The "Arctic Silver" line
has been around for some time- it is the companies flagship thermal compound and
is usually regarded at the industry's best. Note that the previous compound was
AS3, as no AS4 was ever produced.
In this review we wanted to test the two products and see if the more
expensive of the pair, the AS5, was worthy of all the hype. [This review will be
used later on to test against other companies' thermal compounds]
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