Intel Stock Thermal Compound Review
How We Tested
Contents
We tested the thermal compounds on a Core i3-540 CPU (3.06 GHz), overclocked to 4.0 GHz (23 x 174 MHz) in order to produce a little more heat. We used the stock cooler that comes with this CPU, first using the preappyied thermal compound. Then we removed the cooler, cleaned the CPU and cooler base surfaces, applied a different thermal compound and then tested again. This procedure was repeated for each retail thermal compound used.
We measured temperature with the CPU under full load. In order to get 100% CPU usage in all threads, we ran Prime 95 25.11 (in this version, the software uses all available threads) with the "In-place Large FFTs" option. For each test, we applied the same quantity of thermal compound (about the size of a grain of rice) at the center of the CPU.
The first conclusion was that the stock thermal compound spreads very well, as you see in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Stock thermal compound after installation
Room temperature measurements were taken with a digital thermometer. The core temperature was read with the SpeedFan program (available from the CPU thermal sensors), using an arithmetic average of the core temperature readings. During the tests, the left panel of the case was open.
Hardware Configuration
- Processor: Core i3-540
- CPU Cooler: Stock cooler
- Motherboard: Gigabyte H55M-S2H
- Memory: 4 GB OCZ (DDR3-1600/PC3-12800 with 8-8-8-24 timings), configured at 1,400 MHz
- Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB
- Video card: Integrated video
- Power supply: 3R System iCEAGE IA500HP80 500 W
- Case: GMC R-2 Toast
Operating System Configuration
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Software Used
Error Margin
Since both room temperature and core temperature readings have 1 °C resolution, we adopted a 2 °C error margin, meaning temperature differences below 2 °C are considered irrelevant.