Arctic Ceramic Prototype Review (cont.)

Setup:

Processor is an Athlon 1.4GHz. The core voltage of the CPU is 1.79V. Video Card is an NVidia MX400. RAM is 512 MB of PC2100 CAS 2.5 Micron DDR. Case is an Antec SX1040BII.

The heatsink/fan I am using is the Thermaltake Volcano 7+ with a fan setting of 4500RPM and 6200RPM.

A full load on the processor is done with a program called Folding@Home, a distributive processing program.

All temperatures are recorded with Motherboard Monitor 5. Even though this is not the best method for recording temperatures, it will show a significant difference in temperatures due to the thermal pastes. The best method would be a thermal sensor inside of the processor. This provides an accurate result where as a thermal diode underneath the processor, as in Motherboard Monitor 5, measures a mixture of the air temp and outer temp of the CPU.

A very thin layer of each thermal paste was applied. A drop of paste was put on the processor and spread with a thin plastic edge. You can use any thin piece of plastic to spread the paste, such as a credit card. Remember we are going for the thinnest layer possible.

Each paste was allowed to setup for 24 hours before the tests were run. Tests were run twice for each setting on different days ensuring better accuracy. Full loads were measured after 2 hours of near 100% CPU utilization. Idle CPU was measured after 2 hours of near 0% CPU utilization.

Temperatures:

What can you say, the new Arctic Ceramic looks to be the same kind of quality paste as the dominant Arctic Silver 3. To note: my temperatures are very low right now because it is winter here and my basement is pretty cold. Why should I heat it, that's why I bought my space heater, the Athlon?

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