Originally posted by: SickBeast
Whoever put tap water on their CPU is nuts.
IMO their testing methodology must be flawed. Silver has the best conductivity of any element AFAIK. There's no way that toothpaste could outdo it.
It's only nuts to put tap water on your IHS if you put so much on there that it spills down over the side and into the socket so as to short the pins.
There's nothing detrimental to come from putting water
on the IHS, it is made of meta and is more electrically conductive than water.
Yep, silver is better than copper is better than gold is better than aluminum for
thermal conductivity.
My suspicion is that during their limited testing period the "pastes" which have volatile components were evaporating and aiding the cooling efficiency of the entire IHS/TIM/HSF heat dissipation ensemble. No doubt water helps in this regard. But it isn't sustainable as the volatile components aren't recaptured and cycled like a heatpipe would do, so eventually the pastes would become cake and no doubt the thermal conductivity would decline dramatically.
The author has, IMO, a classic case of the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous, not enough knowledge to be value-add" in this "review".