Review on Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Grease Paste by Mike Davan

I recently had to repair my radiator, which gave me the opportunity to meet liquid metal for the first time and pit two heavyweights of the liquid metal world against one another. These two are Liquid Pro by Grizzly Conductonaut and Coollaboratories. My test bed: CPU: AMD FX-9590 is the latest of the avant-garde and the famous oven that instantly heats up to over 70 degrees Celsius and shuts down the PC without proper cooling. Motherboard: Asus Crosshair V. Formula-Z Cooling: Corsair - H115i - AiO water cooler RAM: 16GB (2 x 8GB) G.Skill Trident 2400MHz GPU: EVGA 980 Ti Classified Edition Liquid Metal Notes on use: NOT WITH ALUMINIUM USE! Liquid metal can and will combine with other metals, leaving scars or worse pits where the metal essentially "rottes". That's why there's a sign "DO NOT USE ON ALUMINUM!" signs are everywhere. In addition, the aluminum dust resulting from this compound can easily "explode" since the chemical reaction produces water. So yes. Do not use on aluminum surfaces. Nickel and copper are fine as both will either not be damaged at all or the latter will suffer very minimal damage from exposure to the liquid metal (usually light to medium stains). Soldered processors show minimal temperature changes. Since they are directly soldered, they are already tuned for maximum thermal efficiency. With liquid metal you get maximum thermal efficiency by separating the die from the CPU and directly contacting the CPU die to the heatsink, which is not possible with AMD or other solder processors like the Intel 9980XE. The whole process of removing and scratching the liquid metal that damages the CPU will void the warranty as most manufacturers' warranties are void once the CPU serial number is no longer visible. You want to apply as thin a layer of liquid metal as possible. If you see bubbles or if it moves when you turn it sideways, you have overfilled. Just use a drop and "draw". Application: For this test I applied Conductonaut to my CPU and GPU. Its packaging is fantastic. Grizzly has done everything to make things easy. It comes with two black Japanese Q-tips. They are tightly wrapped and will not fall apart in use, which is EXTREMELY important as they will not damage the connection. There's also a curved syringe applicator tip, as well as a suction tip for sucking up excess liquid metal. It also comes with two pads of 70% (nasty) isopropyl alcohol. As for the differences from Liquid Pro, there are many. Conductonaut is much easier to spread and does it perfectly. Cotton swabs don't fall apart and work fantastic. You can even put cotton swabs in a plastic bag and reapply the leftover metal next time. The curved tip works wonders as you don't have to awkwardly hold the tube vertically over the application processor. It also not only squirts like Liquid Pro, you have much better control over the amount that comes out. The alcohol pads were too small and too wet, but they aren't as big as the Coollaboratories pads and I didn't have to wring them out, unlike the Coollaboratories which were soaked with too much alcohol. Test: cold start. and the idle temp brought me back to 39 degrees celsius on boot and after idling in the OS my temp was 28 degrees celsius. I haven't had such low idle temperatures since I first applied diamond thermal compound to my FX-8350 a few years ago. The 9590 has even worse heat dissipation, as well as a higher base clock speed of 0.7GHz, and it keeps up with those speeds, which is impressive. That's the record for my 9590 at the moment as I don't think I've ever gone below 36 with my diamond paste. The GPU idle temperature is 38 degrees Celsius, down from the previous low 50 degrees it previously ran. I ran a torture test on Prime95 for over an hour. The temperature fluctuated around 41-42 degrees Celsius and never rose above 45 degrees. During a normal gaming session consisting of streaming client, chatbot, chat program, Discord, stream preview via Chrome and of course Monster Hunter World in 1080p high definition, the temperatures remained consistently high. at 41-42 degrees Celsius on the CPU, compared to the normal 64 degrees Celsius of the previous settings. The GPU withstood 60 degrees Celsius, which is 8 degrees lower than the previous 68 degrees Celsius from the Liquid Pro and IC7 Diamond. Overclocking Tests: I was able to overclock the FX-9590 to 5.02GHz with no issues. CPU idle temperatures range from 29 degrees Celsius to the mid-30s, which is amazing. Launching another streaming session of Conductonaut demonstrates the power of liquid metal, it becomes more effective as the temperature rises. With a 5.02 GHz overclock, the CPU temperature leveled off at 36 degrees Celsius, which is 5 degrees cooler than without overclocking! The GPU temperature was kept at 62 degrees Celsius this time. I added +551MHz to the memory clock and +88MHz to the GPU base clock. Keep in mind that the classified 980 Ti comes pre-overclocked, so it's going to be crazy! I ran Uniengine overlay tests. At 1080p, the GPU's high temperature jumped to 70 degrees Celsius, well below the 85 they used to be. The average FPS was 77 with a maximum of 94 FPS. The result was 10251 with no faults, which puts it 7th in the individual 980 Ti rankings. Not bad considering it's been overtaken by Ryzen and the 8700K. After trying my luck, I increased the memory clock by another +100MHz and increased the GPU clock to +128MHz. The anomaly seeding test failed with a memory clock of +651 MHz and a GPU clock of +128 MHz. I lowered the memory frequency to +600MHz and the GPU frequency to +115MHz. There were still some anomalies, but he survived, the temperature never exceeded 61 degrees Celsius (the fans were at 100%). A score of 10459 puts me in 6th place and #1 is 10938. Now for the CPU torture tests. Prime 95 failed miserably. 2 cores failed immediately. After restarting the test, the entire PC froze. I increased the CPU voltage from 1.48 to 1.5 to see if it is related to power consumption. After this change, the minimum temperature increased by 2 degrees, while the maximum remained the same. The test persisted for a few minutes before freezing again. After increasing to 1.51 it still did the same. Lowering the voltage to 1.47 and overclocking to 4.92 GHz was stable again, Prime95 ran for an hour without problems. The processor temperature did not rise above 42 degrees Celsius during the test. Not quite the thrill of breaking the 5GHz wall, but I'll take it! All in all Conductonaut shows why it is #1 in the liquid metal market. The competition isn't even close. From ease of use to performance, Conductonaut leaves everyone behind and has no hope of catching up. Tests show a significant drop in temperature compared to the competition, sometimes up to 20 degrees. This will be my only supplier of liquid metal until someone dethrones them as I'm pleasantly surprised with the results.