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Review on ARCTIC MX 4 2019 Performance Durability Computer Components for Internal Components by Adam Roman

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Do you have a hiss? It's going to be shizzle

I've been using Arctic brand thermal compounds for a number of decades. They've always impressed me, but I think this one impressed me the most. I have an AMD FX-9370 and to say that this thing resembles an oven would be an understatement. Since it was still lying around collecting dust when Monero switched to the RandomX algorithm, I decided to see what this kid could do for XMR mining. . I have a huge air-cooled heatsink with two fans in push-pull mode that usually keep that heat monster out. But when the CPU was running at 100%, heat would eventually build up for several hours and the rig would shut down due to CPU overheating. Layer on the entire chip so there are no air gaps and reinstalled the chip. Upon reboot, I restarted the mining software and also ran the system test software so I could log the CPU temperature information. After that, the installation worked for several days without shutting down. Where it was shut down 8-10 hours after reaching 85C, the logs showed temperatures briefly hovering around 78C and typically in the 74-76C range. Pretty impressive drop considering I just changed the paste. And it's not like I removed the old crappy or cheap paste. The chip was reinstalled last year with MX-2 paste. By the way, this stuff is just as effective on GPUs. Do you have an energy-hungry monster that can heat the house in the winter, but you don't want to mortgage the house to buy special thermal paste at an inflated price? This could very well be your ticket.

Pros
  • Electronics
Cons
  • Expandable