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youtuber tech ingredients made some pretty bold claims recently saying that

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their homemade thermal compound can outperform commercial solutions like

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arctic silver so naturally immediately after that video drop we received dozens

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of emails asking us to test it out i mean arctic silver has silver in it

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could anything be more conductive than silver tech ingredients sure think so so

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we got our hands on it and we are going to be

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with full attention to all the warnings trying this

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out and the video is brought to you by aorus

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the aorus 15g features an Intel 10th gen processor with strong battery life and

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performance and tons of features check it out today at the link in the video

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description

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the craziest part of this is not only does tech ingredients say that this will

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outperform a commercial solution he also says that you can make it at home as

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long as you've got some dendritic copper epoxy graphene diamond and access to a

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high-powered ultrasound or a cell disrupter we just went ahead and paid

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the 20 bucks or whatever it was to have him send it over now i'm really excited

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to test this but there is one major caveat as is laid out in the

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instructions this bond is permanent meaning this is more like a thermal

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epoxy and less like a thermal paste so

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when i was putting together my test bench for today i had to consider a

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couple of things number one is i needed something that output enough heat that i

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was going to be able to tell the difference between my reference thermal solutions over here

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and the tech ingredients thermal epoxy and number two i needed a test bench

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where i wouldn't be too choked up if my CPU was permanently bonded to the bottom

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of my cooler so i chose an AMD fx 8150

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this thing was known for being an absolute inferno of a chip and

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not real fast and this

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thing this is the thermaltake black widow spin

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q i'm not actually sure what it's called it seems to have two names

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universal CPU cooler been a while since i've dragged the old crosshair four out

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of mothballs one thing that i went and grabbed is

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some of these Noctua cleaning wipes normally i'm pretty loosey-goosey about

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the way that i clean cpus in between thermal paste applications but because

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we're actually trying to measure the difference in performance between

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thermal pastes it's pretty important that we do a great job of cleaning our

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CPU here let's get some RAM installed throw a period appropriate graphics card

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on here we're going to start with what i'm expecting to be the least performant

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thermal interface this is the innovation cooling ic graphite thermal pad and to

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be clear i'm not saying it's bad it's just that the sales pitch for these pads

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is that they're reusable and they don't make a mess not that their performance

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is right up there with the top thermal pastes so we just plonk that on there

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and we're ready to mount our cooler oh i actually lied to you guys a little bit

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i think this is going to be the least performant

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thermal interface let's try this one too this is the included thermal paste with

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this uh kind of cheapo cooler one thing that's nice about using an AMD CPU for

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this that uses the clip based hold down is we're gonna have identical mounting

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pressure on all of our thermal interface materials there's no real room for user

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error because you can't over or under tighten it to make our lives easier

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we're not going to bother with idle temperatures that's not really where the

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men get separated from the boys when it comes to thermal solutions anyway so

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let's go ahead and fire up a classic stress test for a classic

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CPU smallest fft eight threads

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and then we're gonna wait until the CPU temperature reaches

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about a stable point and we're going to go ahead and we're going to click this

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clock down here to reset our average values and let it run for two or three

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minutes 50 degrees under load qualified as a inferno of a CPU now we've got you

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know the Intel 10th gen i'm a little rusty on my fx overclocking

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but about 4.5 gigahertz with about 1.42 volts or so after some trial and

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error where we got reacquainted with the fx 8150s 70 degree celsius maximum

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temperature we settled on 1.475 volts with turbo disabled and 4

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gigahertz clock speed giving us about

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68 degrees under load with our thermal pad so now what we're gonna do is reset

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our timer and take an average over about two minutes after a little over two

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minutes we've got no thermal throttling an average temperature of 67.7 degrees

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celsius and a maximum of 69.1 nice

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now for our next thermal compound this is nice we don't have to clean it

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because all we had on there was one of these thermal pads but we're definitely

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going to have to clean it after our next attempt what do you think andy

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quality thermal compound or the gross included garbage

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let's do the included garbage baby now at this point of the game i could wait

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around for the temperature to reach equilibrium or

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i could take nature into my own hands by running the CPU at effectively what is a

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greater ambient temperature we can cause it to heat up to approximately where we

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think it's going to end up and then it should normalize a little bit

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sooner it's a free tech tip hey look how fast it's heating up the system works

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meanwhile steve over at gamer's nexus with like liquid nitrogen pots

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wow i knew that these thermal pads were optimized for convenience rather than

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performance but dang even the generic stuff included with our heatsink is that

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uh what's my average here 60.1 now i'm

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really not sure what to expect from a quality thermal paste are we gonna drop

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like another seven degrees

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kind of doubt that oh i always forget about this even though it's actually the

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reason i chose an AMD chip because

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obviously once the CPU and the heatsink are glued together i'm not going to be

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able to get at the release mechanism so i wanted something that worst case

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scenario i could just yank out of the socket you gotta you gotta twist ladies

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and gentlemen there that's better let's get this bad boy cleaned up he's

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knocked to a cleaning cloth or the next level that is a clean

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fx CPU ladies and gentlemen no harm no foul do we really need to use two like

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high quality thermal pastes i think just one is fine uh do you want Noctua or mx4

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all right so i want a very similar amount but i'm

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also going to make sure that i spread it out man it's weird seeing the old green

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AMD logo here on the desktop the shortcut is the old green logo i like

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totally forgot it used to be green and then they started competing in graphics

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and it's like oh well we can't have team green and team green bang on andy

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59.1 you nailed it one degree better

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before using this product you might want to review some principles of using thermal interface materials demonstrated

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in our tech ingredients video wear gloves protect your work surface

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with some disposable plastic film

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contact with epoxy can irritate the skin got it

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after preparing and cleaning the surfaces remove the caps on the syringes

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and eject the quantity you plan to use the mixing ratio is three parts large

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orange syringe and one part small black syringe watch out the orange syringe is

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more viscous so uh

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we'll need to be a little bit careful to get the right quantities here

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too much dang it they even warned me i knew this

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was gonna happen does that look about twice the size of

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my orange ones what do you think

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yeah okay we'll do three more orange ones

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good i love science-y instructions written

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for scientists stir the components thoroughly until the color is a

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completely homogeneous dark brown and then mix for another 30 seconds

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i'm going to use this plastic mcdonald's knife homogeneous dark brown

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wow it's kind of grainy which i guess makes sense given that it's made of like

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little grains of diamond graphite and

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indirect copper okay we've got to mix it for another 30 seconds though i'm very

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specific about that i am going to follow instructions for

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once in my life because this stuff seems like serious science shiz here

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all right wow it really starts to thicken up a bit there

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interesting okay that seems like about 30 seconds

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more of mixing wow all right cool apparently we've got about 45

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minutes before we can't work with it anymore now we need to put a thin layer

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of this stuff on each of our surfaces

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this is not the best spready spreading tool

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um you know what i'm just going to use my glove so those are on there now get

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this there's an element to the instructions that i actually didn't read until now

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once they're on there you're going to want to grab a

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fingernail-sized piece of medium sandpaper

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and abrade the epoxy mixture for a few seconds into each surface before placing

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them into contact oh yeah here's some 400 grit sandpaper which i guess is

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medium-ish this hurts me so much we're going

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heavier guys i made the mistake of following the written instructions

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without looking carefully at the video instructions and it seems like he put it

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on much much heavier than i expected so

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i'm just going to go ahead i'm going to mix up a whole bunch more and we're

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going to try and get this on there before it cures so we're going heavier

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here we're going heavier here we go

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i guess this is the part of the video where i acknowledge that we shot this

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over a couple of days because of that whole issue with the

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69 degree thermal limit so i'm putting this on as far as i can

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tell correctly from tech ingredients video obviously

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he didn't apply it to a CPU but hey that's what you guys need me for

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it's definitely on there andy what's going to happen

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no no what's actually going to happen do you think it's going to outperform the

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paste it's glue it's thermal glue dendritic copper

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diamond now i hate this when you've got one

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dirty finger from what you were doing before and you got to wash your whole

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hand you know i'm just going to take it to 59 because then we're going to see

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whether it keeps going up or goes down this is interesting it's a good thing we

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left a little bit of headroom between the thermal pad and the 70 degree

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thermal throttling limit because you can see here

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we are actually in between pad performance and that 70 degree limit

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with the epoxy fortunately we're not throttling so this

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should be the same amount of thermal output and our result should still be valid

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i spoke too soon during our two minute run we thermal throttled you can see all

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these cores dropped down to 1.4 gigahertz they ramped back up you can

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see we're running at full speed now but

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it clearly was outperformed by every other solution

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we tested now i kind of feel bad about the way i

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presented the intro because i had intended to like seem skeptical but i

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actually thought that this was gonna outperform it i didn't mean for this to

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just be like dunking on their thermal compound it's the next day

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it occurs to me that maybe our thermal epoxy doesn't perform at peak efficiency

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until it's actually hardened so we're gonna fire the machine back up i let it

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sit not running because i i wasn't sure how

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having it be hot would affect the curing and we're going to take one more crack

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at it here just checking the numbers from yesterday i think it's going to perform quite well compared to them want

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to see a nice flat line before we start our two-minute run though it starts out

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high from our heat gun shortcut then comes back down

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and now it's creeping its way back up again i'm trying to wrap my brain around

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this behavior how can you have the same thermal interface material in there that

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performs differently over time

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it seems to be very clearly doing that

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though maybe tech ingredients could do a follow-up explaining this i'd love to

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know like is it expanding how long should it take to reach equilibrium

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i'm disappointed i was ready to come in this morning and say

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well stupid me i shouldn't have been testing it before it was cured anyway

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but we're actually seeing pretty much the same behavior at this point we just

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touched 68 degrees for the first time a little while back there and you can see

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we've got a pretty consistent trend upward right as i was saying that it

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thermal throttled so two of our cores dropped down to 1.4 gigahertz

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that we can't give it a temperature score at that point that's a just a fail

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with thermal performance worse than even our graphite pad it's safe to say i

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won't be recommending tech ingredients as thermal epoxy for your CPU any time

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soon but it's also safe to say that they never recommended it for that either

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it's for situations where you cannot use a higher performance thermal grease and

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you know what i think my expectations were probably a bit unreasonable here

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but given that the only reference that i had for its relatively high performance

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was a competing thermal epoxy that nobody in their right mind would put on

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a CPU i just didn't really have a frame of reference and neither did you so i

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can understand what you guys wanted me to test it for all i can hope now is

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that its performance as an epoxy

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is disappointing and at least i can get my CPU back oh

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okay i think it's glued but as we've

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seen before it should still be possible to pull the CPU out of the socket yeah here we go so

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it looks like a we definitely had enough to cover the

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entire ihs because we've got that seepage all the way around the edge and

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b we've obviously got a fair amount of mounting pressure on here because

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otherwise why would it seep out from around the edges there remember how i

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was able to twist off the old thermal paste well the epoxy component works

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shucks ah oh my goodness

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like look how durable this stuff is i'm scratching at it with a knife and it's

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not even entirely coming off i know sometimes blunt force can be better for

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cracking epoxy

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so we have no choice but to keep going enter

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the power fist

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wow i think it's kind of a

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30 chance this thing still works after what just happened to it but what

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happens now if i just put like a

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thermal pad on it oh wow

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that's bent i'm not even gonna try to

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mount it properly and like i'm just gonna see if it you know posts well the

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CPU still works i mean we can never you know use it for certain kinds of testing

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anymore because it's covered in epoxy but at least i can give it back to the

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inventory guys knowing that my inventory checkout sheet is clear

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just like i'm clear to segue into our sponsor manscape manscaped is featuring

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linked below if you guys enjoyed this video and you like thermal compound

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experiments maybe check out the one from actually three years ago where we bought

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the cheapest like bulk gigantic jar of thermal compound that we'd ever seen and

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tested its performance