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Arctic Alumina Thermal Compound
New Kid In Town
Arctic Silver has become a household name to computer enthusiasts, and overclockers alike, ever since the Arctic Silver thermal compound product line came into existence. Arctic Silver and Arctic Silver II have become highly recognized for their performance and cost effectiveness, not to mention their ease of application as compared to some types of generic heatsink paste. Around November 20th, 2001 Arctic Silver Inc. will be publicly releasing a new thermal compound called Arctic Alumina. This is what we will be testing today.
What's Different?
When Arctic Alumina becomes available to the general public, it will ship with a white Mylar label instead of the silver one you see pictured in this review. The color difference in the labels should help deter any confusion when glancing over or ordering these compounds. So don't be confused if you see some of these labels in the future and they look different than what you expect. Let's look at the features of the new Arctic Alumina.
Arctic Alumina is different from its predecessor Arctic Silver II, because it contains no silicone, where Arctic Silver II contains between 18 - 22% silicone. The Alumina compound uses a layered composite of Aluminum Oxide (Al2O3) and Boron Nitride (BN), which, if you remember from Engineering Class are both considered ceramics. Both of these materials have good thermal conductivity and electrical resistance, thus making Arctic Alumina neither conductive nor capacitive. In simple terms, it means if you accidentally get a little bit on the bridges on top of your CPU, the materials that make up Arctic Alumina should prevent those bridges from inadvertently or accidentally closing. Note also the product name, “Arctic Alumina” is derived from the fact that Aluminum Oxide is commonly referred to as “Alumina.”
The consistency of Alumina changes during its course of use. I have cut and pasted what I found at Arctic Silver's site since they explain it rather well:
The complex polysynthetic oils work together to provide three distinctive functional phases. As it comes from the tube, Arctic Alumina's consistency is optimized for application in a thin, even layer. During the CPU's initial use, the Arctic Alumina compound thins out slightly to enhance the filling of the microscopic valleys and insure the best physical contact between the heatsink and CPU core. Then the compound slowly thickens over the next 20 to 100 hours of use to its final consistency designed for long-term stability.
Applying
We weren't going to cover the application of the compound since it's pretty self-explanatory. We did however, want to cover a few things slightly. One of the goals of Arctic Silver Inc. was to make the application process with Arctic Alumina easy by means of product consistency. It's difficult to portray this in a review, but Alumina was very easy to spread as compared to other thermal compounds. I am glad the Alumina comes in the same syringe-style tube as Arctic Silver II. If you have ever tried to apply thermal compound out of the cut-off-the-end-squeeze-style-plastic-cheap-applicators, then you know how much of a pain it can be. When you are applying the Alumina, you will notice the actual compound is white in color, which probably comes from the Boron Nitride inside. Other than that, applying the compound was pretty much the same as Arctic Silver II. Let's get on with the fun part shall we? - the testing.
Testing
On their website, Arctic Silver claims that Arctic Alumina will "provide near Arctic Silver II level performance." So that performance is what we set out to test. To test this statement, we compared Arctic Alumina to not only its predecessor, Arctic Silver II, but also against some generic white silicone heatsink paste which was included with a Vantec heat sink. The test setup consists of an Epox 8K7A motherboard, AMD T-Bird 1400 @ 1543 (10.5 x 147 @ 1.87V), Vantec CCK-6027D heatsink, Win98SE and 256MB PC2100 RAM. The Epox motherboard has a thermister below the CPU that was used to record the temperatures. After the thermal compound was applied and the heatsink installed, the machine was booted and monitored until the temperature stabilized (25-30 minutes on average). Once the no-load temperature was recorded, SETI@Home command line client was launched at normal priority until the temperature stabilized again for the full load readings.
The Arctic Alumina temperatures were the same as Arctic Silver II in both scenarios, so the claim of near Arctic Silver II level performance is true. But if we are talking about marketing, the cheap no-name thermal paste was only one degree higher under full load and two degrees higher under no load; therefore that is "near Arctic Silver II level performance" as well.
Conclusion
One of the biggest factors in this review is to focus on what Arctic Silver is aiming for in their new product, Arctic Alumina. Their goal was to release a new non-conductive thermal compound that performs well, applies easily, and is cheaper than their previous products and other thermal compounds. The letter we received with the product stated the Alumina line "offers performance close to the reference Arctic Silver product at a substantially lower cost". We tested the performance, and since the Alumina performed the same as Arctic Silver II, they are correct in the "performance section" of the statement... but the cheap no-name thermal paste we tested performed close to Arctic Silver II as well. Arctic Alumina has a suggested retail price of $3.95 per 1.75-gram tube and I found Arctic Silver II on the web for $7.00 for a 3.0-gram tube. This breaks down to $2.26 per gram of Arctic Alumina and $2.33 per gram of Arctic Silver II, so the Alumina is only marginally cheaper than Arctic Silver II. It is not substantially cheaper, but it is still cheaper nonetheless. Personally, I have never used an entire tube of thermal compound before, since even the 1.75-gram tube is enough for numerous applications.
There are a few benefits that Arctic Alumina is bringing to the market. The fact that Arctic Alumina is neither conductive nor capacitive could set a new standard for thermal compounds (since no one wants to be the responsible party for damaging a CPU). Also, when it comes time to change or re-apply the thermal compound, Arctic Alumina definitely cleans up easier then Arctic Silver II. Arctic Silver II smears terribly and it can be a real pain to completely remove it from a CPU.
The bottom line is, the performance of the Alumina is the same as Arctic Silver II and slightly better than the generic paste we tested. If you already have some thermal compound in your reach, I wouldn't throw it out to buy Arctic Alumina. On the other hand, if you are out of thermal compound and need more, I would buy the Arctic Alumina over Arctic Silver II because it's less expensive, non-conductive, and much, much easier to clean if you happen to change heatsinks.
Update: I was just informed by one of our readers (Kremlin) that the reason the Arctic Alumina comes in a 1.75 gram tube instead of a 3.0 gram tube is because Aluminum Oxide and Boron don't have as much mass as Silver and Silicone, therefore not as much is needed to cover each CPU. I just checked Arcticsilver's site again and verified that when applied at a layer of 0.003 inches thick, AS2 will cover approximately 18 square inches and at the same thickness, Alumina will cover approximately 24 square inches. This shows that my price per gram statements above, although true, are misleading to the consumer, and 1.75 grams of Arctic Alumina will cover more CPU's than 3.0 grams of AS2.
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Copyright © by LWD All Rights Reserved. Published on: 2004-02-01 (16198 reads) [ Go Back ] |
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