youtuber tech ingredients made some pretty bold claims recently saying that
their homemade thermal compound can outperform commercial solutions like
arctic silver so naturally immediately after that video drop we received dozens
of emails asking us to test it out i mean arctic silver has silver in it
could anything be more conductive than silver tech ingredients sure think so so
we got our hands on it and we are going to be
with full attention to all the warnings trying this
out and the video is brought to you by aorus
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the craziest part of this is not only does tech ingredients say that this will
outperform a commercial solution he also says that you can make it at home as
long as you've got some dendritic copper epoxy graphene diamond and access to a
high-powered ultrasound or a cell disrupter we just went ahead and paid
the 20 bucks or whatever it was to have him send it over now i'm really excited
to test this but there is one major caveat as is laid out in the
instructions this bond is permanent meaning this is more like a thermal
epoxy and less like a thermal paste so
when i was putting together my test bench for today i had to consider a
couple of things number one is i needed something that output enough heat that i
was going to be able to tell the difference between my reference thermal solutions over here
and the tech ingredients thermal epoxy and number two i needed a test bench
where i wouldn't be too choked up if my CPU was permanently bonded to the bottom
of my cooler so i chose an AMD fx 8150
this thing was known for being an absolute inferno of a chip and
not real fast and this
thing this is the thermaltake black widow spin
q i'm not actually sure what it's called it seems to have two names
universal CPU cooler been a while since i've dragged the old crosshair four out
of mothballs one thing that i went and grabbed is
some of these Noctua cleaning wipes normally i'm pretty loosey-goosey about
the way that i clean cpus in between thermal paste applications but because
we're actually trying to measure the difference in performance between
thermal pastes it's pretty important that we do a great job of cleaning our
CPU here let's get some RAM installed throw a period appropriate graphics card
on here we're going to start with what i'm expecting to be the least performant
thermal interface this is the innovation cooling ic graphite thermal pad and to
be clear i'm not saying it's bad it's just that the sales pitch for these pads
is that they're reusable and they don't make a mess not that their performance
is right up there with the top thermal pastes so we just plonk that on there
and we're ready to mount our cooler oh i actually lied to you guys a little bit
i think this is going to be the least performant
thermal interface let's try this one too this is the included thermal paste with
this uh kind of cheapo cooler one thing that's nice about using an AMD CPU for
this that uses the clip based hold down is we're gonna have identical mounting
pressure on all of our thermal interface materials there's no real room for user
error because you can't over or under tighten it to make our lives easier
we're not going to bother with idle temperatures that's not really where the
men get separated from the boys when it comes to thermal solutions anyway so
let's go ahead and fire up a classic stress test for a classic
CPU smallest fft eight threads
and then we're gonna wait until the CPU temperature reaches
about a stable point and we're going to go ahead and we're going to click this
clock down here to reset our average values and let it run for two or three
minutes 50 degrees under load qualified as a inferno of a CPU now we've got you
know the Intel 10th gen i'm a little rusty on my fx overclocking
but about 4.5 gigahertz with about 1.42 volts or so after some trial and
error where we got reacquainted with the fx 8150s 70 degree celsius maximum
temperature we settled on 1.475 volts with turbo disabled and 4
gigahertz clock speed giving us about
68 degrees under load with our thermal pad so now what we're gonna do is reset
our timer and take an average over about two minutes after a little over two
minutes we've got no thermal throttling an average temperature of 67.7 degrees
celsius and a maximum of 69.1 nice
now for our next thermal compound this is nice we don't have to clean it
because all we had on there was one of these thermal pads but we're definitely
going to have to clean it after our next attempt what do you think andy
quality thermal compound or the gross included garbage
let's do the included garbage baby now at this point of the game i could wait
around for the temperature to reach equilibrium or
i could take nature into my own hands by running the CPU at effectively what is a
greater ambient temperature we can cause it to heat up to approximately where we
think it's going to end up and then it should normalize a little bit
sooner it's a free tech tip hey look how fast it's heating up the system works
meanwhile steve over at gamer's nexus with like liquid nitrogen pots
wow i knew that these thermal pads were optimized for convenience rather than
performance but dang even the generic stuff included with our heatsink is that
uh what's my average here 60.1 now i'm
really not sure what to expect from a quality thermal paste are we gonna drop
like another seven degrees
kind of doubt that oh i always forget about this even though it's actually the
reason i chose an AMD chip because
obviously once the CPU and the heatsink are glued together i'm not going to be
able to get at the release mechanism so i wanted something that worst case
scenario i could just yank out of the socket you gotta you gotta twist ladies
and gentlemen there that's better let's get this bad boy cleaned up he's
knocked to a cleaning cloth or the next level that is a clean
fx CPU ladies and gentlemen no harm no foul do we really need to use two like
high quality thermal pastes i think just one is fine uh do you want Noctua or mx4
all right so i want a very similar amount but i'm
also going to make sure that i spread it out man it's weird seeing the old green
AMD logo here on the desktop the shortcut is the old green logo i like
totally forgot it used to be green and then they started competing in graphics
and it's like oh well we can't have team green and team green bang on andy
59.1 you nailed it one degree better
before using this product you might want to review some principles of using thermal interface materials demonstrated
in our tech ingredients video wear gloves protect your work surface
with some disposable plastic film
contact with epoxy can irritate the skin got it
after preparing and cleaning the surfaces remove the caps on the syringes
and eject the quantity you plan to use the mixing ratio is three parts large
orange syringe and one part small black syringe watch out the orange syringe is
more viscous so uh
we'll need to be a little bit careful to get the right quantities here
too much dang it they even warned me i knew this
was gonna happen does that look about twice the size of
my orange ones what do you think
yeah okay we'll do three more orange ones
good i love science-y instructions written
for scientists stir the components thoroughly until the color is a
completely homogeneous dark brown and then mix for another 30 seconds
i'm going to use this plastic mcdonald's knife homogeneous dark brown
wow it's kind of grainy which i guess makes sense given that it's made of like
little grains of diamond graphite and
indirect copper okay we've got to mix it for another 30 seconds though i'm very
specific about that i am going to follow instructions for
once in my life because this stuff seems like serious science shiz here
all right wow it really starts to thicken up a bit there
interesting okay that seems like about 30 seconds
more of mixing wow all right cool apparently we've got about 45
minutes before we can't work with it anymore now we need to put a thin layer
of this stuff on each of our surfaces
this is not the best spready spreading tool
um you know what i'm just going to use my glove so those are on there now get
this there's an element to the instructions that i actually didn't read until now
once they're on there you're going to want to grab a
fingernail-sized piece of medium sandpaper
and abrade the epoxy mixture for a few seconds into each surface before placing
them into contact oh yeah here's some 400 grit sandpaper which i guess is
medium-ish this hurts me so much we're going
heavier guys i made the mistake of following the written instructions
without looking carefully at the video instructions and it seems like he put it
on much much heavier than i expected so
i'm just going to go ahead i'm going to mix up a whole bunch more and we're
going to try and get this on there before it cures so we're going heavier
here we're going heavier here we go
i guess this is the part of the video where i acknowledge that we shot this
over a couple of days because of that whole issue with the
69 degree thermal limit so i'm putting this on as far as i can
tell correctly from tech ingredients video obviously
he didn't apply it to a CPU but hey that's what you guys need me for
it's definitely on there andy what's going to happen
no no what's actually going to happen do you think it's going to outperform the
paste it's glue it's thermal glue dendritic copper
diamond now i hate this when you've got one
dirty finger from what you were doing before and you got to wash your whole
hand you know i'm just going to take it to 59 because then we're going to see
whether it keeps going up or goes down this is interesting it's a good thing we
left a little bit of headroom between the thermal pad and the 70 degree
thermal throttling limit because you can see here
we are actually in between pad performance and that 70 degree limit
with the epoxy fortunately we're not throttling so this
should be the same amount of thermal output and our result should still be valid
i spoke too soon during our two minute run we thermal throttled you can see all
these cores dropped down to 1.4 gigahertz they ramped back up you can
see we're running at full speed now but
it clearly was outperformed by every other solution
we tested now i kind of feel bad about the way i
presented the intro because i had intended to like seem skeptical but i
actually thought that this was gonna outperform it i didn't mean for this to
just be like dunking on their thermal compound it's the next day
it occurs to me that maybe our thermal epoxy doesn't perform at peak efficiency
until it's actually hardened so we're gonna fire the machine back up i let it
sit not running because i i wasn't sure how
having it be hot would affect the curing and we're going to take one more crack
at it here just checking the numbers from yesterday i think it's going to perform quite well compared to them want
to see a nice flat line before we start our two-minute run though it starts out
high from our heat gun shortcut then comes back down
and now it's creeping its way back up again i'm trying to wrap my brain around
this behavior how can you have the same thermal interface material in there that
performs differently over time
it seems to be very clearly doing that
though maybe tech ingredients could do a follow-up explaining this i'd love to
know like is it expanding how long should it take to reach equilibrium
i'm disappointed i was ready to come in this morning and say
well stupid me i shouldn't have been testing it before it was cured anyway
but we're actually seeing pretty much the same behavior at this point we just
touched 68 degrees for the first time a little while back there and you can see
we've got a pretty consistent trend upward right as i was saying that it
thermal throttled so two of our cores dropped down to 1.4 gigahertz
that we can't give it a temperature score at that point that's a just a fail
with thermal performance worse than even our graphite pad it's safe to say i
won't be recommending tech ingredients as thermal epoxy for your CPU any time
soon but it's also safe to say that they never recommended it for that either
it's for situations where you cannot use a higher performance thermal grease and
you know what i think my expectations were probably a bit unreasonable here
but given that the only reference that i had for its relatively high performance
was a competing thermal epoxy that nobody in their right mind would put on
a CPU i just didn't really have a frame of reference and neither did you so i
can understand what you guys wanted me to test it for all i can hope now is
that its performance as an epoxy
is disappointing and at least i can get my CPU back oh
okay i think it's glued but as we've
seen before it should still be possible to pull the CPU out of the socket yeah here we go so
it looks like a we definitely had enough to cover the
entire ihs because we've got that seepage all the way around the edge and
b we've obviously got a fair amount of mounting pressure on here because
otherwise why would it seep out from around the edges there remember how i
was able to twist off the old thermal paste well the epoxy component works
shucks ah oh my goodness
like look how durable this stuff is i'm scratching at it with a knife and it's
not even entirely coming off i know sometimes blunt force can be better for
cracking epoxy
so we have no choice but to keep going enter
the power fist
wow i think it's kind of a
30 chance this thing still works after what just happened to it but what
happens now if i just put like a
thermal pad on it oh wow
that's bent i'm not even gonna try to
mount it properly and like i'm just gonna see if it you know posts well the
CPU still works i mean we can never you know use it for certain kinds of testing
anymore because it's covered in epoxy but at least i can give it back to the
inventory guys knowing that my inventory checkout sheet is clear
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linked below if you guys enjoyed this video and you like thermal compound
experiments maybe check out the one from actually three years ago where we bought
the cheapest like bulk gigantic jar of thermal compound that we'd ever seen and
tested its performance