arctic silver 5 vs MX-2

[HuNTeR-]

I want to buy asus g73jh,and I want to reaplied thermal paste on gpu and cpu.Which thermal paste is better: Arctic silver 5 or MX-2?For me is important any degree.Thanks,

 

[lehtv]

Do you already have these pastes? If so it doesn't really matter which one you use, they're similar quality. If not and you're considering what to buy, I'd recommend MX-4.

I want to buy asus g73jh

You want to reapply thermal paste on a laptop? People do that? 🙂 I highly doubt it's going to make enough of a difference to be worth the hassle.

 

[PliotronX]

MX-2 is generally a better performer and not even slightly capacitive. It tends to perform better than MX-3 and 4 and suffers less long term deterioration. MX-2 is one of my all time favs 🙂

 

[lehtv]

MX-2 is generally a better performer and not even slightly capacitive. It tends to perform better than MX-3 and 4 and suffers less long term deterioration. MX-2 is one of my all time favs 🙂

Tom's Hardware's thermal paste roundup results disagree with that. MX-2 is better only when used on the GPU. For the CPU, MX-4 is better and MX-2 and AS5 are about the same.

Closed-Loop Liquid Cooler; High Mounting Pressure
MX-4 32.4
MX-2 32.9
AS5 33.0
-> MX-4 is better than MX-2 which is about the same as AS5

CPU Air Cooler; High Mounting Pressure
MX-4 36.5
MX-2 36.6
AS5 37.7
-> MX-4 and MX-2 are about the same, AS5 is worse

CPU Air Cooler; Low Mounting Pressure
MX-4 36.9
MX-2 37.5
AS5 37.7
-> MX-4 is better than MX-2 which is about the same as AS5

Air-Cooled GPU; Medium Mounting Pressure
MX-2 66.5
MX-4 67.5
AS5 69.5
-> MX-2 beats MX-4 beats AS5

One can wonder about the margin of error though. Each application of thermal paste is a little different, each mounting a little different, there's a good chance that those decimals are pretty meaningless unless a sufficient number of reapplications was done, but I don't see any mention of testing methodology in the roundup.

TweakTown's results: MX-3 beats MX-4 beats MX-2 beats AS5. However other sites have found that MX-4 beats MX-3 (hardwareheaven, eTeknix), so I'm inclined to believe that MX-4 is indeed the best of the bunch for CPU cooling (as you would expect, given that it's then newest iteration in the MX series).

 

[aigomorla]

the problem with tests on AS5 is the cure time required for AS5.

However MX should still outperform AS5.

 

[lehtv]

^Good point =)