Arctic Silver Ceramique
review by David, 17 August 2003

A Closer Look

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The tubes containing the compound look rather different compared to the ones Arctic Silver used for AS2, AS3 and AS Alumina. Don't be fooled by the pictures, they're actually quite small.

Compared to the older thermal compounds offered by Arctic Silver, Ceramique is much denser. The Alumina thermal compound for example, came in a much larger sized tube, but with only 1.75g of thermal compound inside. Ceramique, on the other hand, came in a much smaller tube, but contained 2.7g per tube.

Squeezing the Ceramique out onto some paper, the compound is much thicker and viscous compared to Alumina, my previous thermal compound of choice. Ceramique retains the great property of being very easily removable from CPU cores, much like Alumina. Just a quick wipe with some tissue paper, and off it goes.

Test System & Results

We tested on the following system, using Arctic Silver Alumina as a comparison compound.

  • Pentium4 2.4C @ 3GHz (12x250) + stock P4 cooler
  • Gigabyte 8PENXP
  • Corsair TwinX512-4000
  • MSI Geforce4 Ti4200 128MB
  • Lian Li PC-12

We heated up the CPU using two instances of Folding@Home, running for an hour straight. Load temperatures were taken after two hours on load, after which the Folding@Home programs were shut down, and the CPU allowed to idle for 30 minutes, after which idle temperatures were recorded. Temperature readings were taken from MBM5.

Arctic Silver recommends a 'breaking in' period of at least 12 hours for the thermal compound to settle in. As such, I didn't actually do any testing until after I had the thermal pastes in my system for two days straight running Folding@Home, just to be on the safe side.

Results

The temperature readings you see above look really high, though thats mainly due to using the stock P4 cooler. Slap on a better cooler and temperatures will improve.

Nevertheless, the Ceramique compound consistently outperforms Alumina by 2C whether on load or idle. Excellent showing by Arctic Silver's latest product.

Conclusion >>