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Sergey Surabekyants
A computer store in Germany found in its warehouse a sealed syringe containing Arctic Cooling silicone thermal paste from 20 years ago. The find interested Igor’s Lab employees. It was decided to test this “thermal paste dinosaur” from the era of Intel Pentium 4 processors. Experts, not without surprise, discovered that the ancient product was in no way inferior to freshly made paste of a similar composition, although it could not compete with modern advanced products.
Image source: Igor’s Lab
An initial inspection showed that the syringe with Arctic Cooling thermal paste remained sealed, the paste had an acceptable consistency and was easily squeezed out. Judging by the inscriptions on the packaging, the paste contained 50% silicone, 20% carbon and 30% metal oxide. When checking the composition using a laser spectroscope, it turned out that the paste consists of 50% silicone and 50% zinc oxide. Apparently, the mention of carbon on the packaging was a marketing trick.
Igor’s Lab specialists noted that modern industrial “a benchmark paste focused on durability” TCTG-4.0 from MCT is extremely close in its characteristics to the tested vintage Arctic Cooling, which proves the almost complete absence of degradation during such long-term storage.
Upon further testing, it turned out that the thermal paste of the Pentium 4 era is not able to compete with modern solutions. Testing the Intel Core i9-13900K processor with the old Arctic Cooling and the modern Alphacool Apex revealed a difference of six degrees Celsius in favor of the new composition. This is an expected difference, although over 20 years of progress in the development of thermal pastes, the result could have been more noticeable.
After testing, Igor’s Lab researchers came to the conclusion that manufacturers’ recommendations on thermal paste packaging “use before” or “best before” can be safely ignored. Of course, this only applies if the paste is stored in its original sealed container in a cool, dark place.
In the 3DNews testing laboratory, thermal pastes were tested several times; the results of these tests can be viewed here, here and here. The results of a large-scale test of 90 modern thermal pastes were recently published by Tom’s Hardware specialists.
2023-12-01 16:20:00
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