Page Two
I've seen comparison articles of a "before & after" nature of some of the newer pastes like ShinEtsu and NanoTherm where dramatic improvements were made by changing pastes--but I've wondered if the improvement was more from a correct (or more correct), application of the paste than the paste itself. What if alot of the gains that reviewers have seen from new pastes over the years are simply because there was a greater amount of care taken in applying the paste for the review. I know when I'm remounting a heatsink after a cleaning, I don't pay nearly the amount of attention to re-applying paste as I would if it were for a review...
These are some of the reasons I've never done a thermal paste review before. There are far too many variables from the application to the measurement itself. Remember the thermal paste shootout where toothpaste was included and out-perfmormed almost everything else in the test?
This isn't to say that all reviews are invalid, or something other than scientifically controlled and accurately measured have any relevance. Quite the contrary, as how many potential buyers of these thermal compounds would bother to take the effort to applying paste in a correct way? Which would you rather have; something that was easier to apply to get the best result, or something that was marginally better but took 10+min to apply for best performance? What if you had to re-apply the paste every 6weeks because it dried out and lost performance if you didn't?
I've got a review of several different compounds that has been practically the whole summer in the making that's still a couple weeks or so from being complete. I'd like to hear from you about how you normally apply paste, what pastes you've used and prefer and which you are interested in that you haven't used. What you guys send in is going to determine my final "shootout" style testing methods--your comments will remain anonymous unless you want your name published.
Email you comments to me Here, or post in the forums Here.
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