ThermalRight Chill Factor Paste

Not being happy with CPU performance alone, I got to thinking why not test this goo on a video card as well.  To this end, we selected a HIS Radeon X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo card and looped Futuremark's 3DMark2006 to put the card under load with both its stock paste and ThermalRight's chill factor.  HIS uses a type of silver paste that is already a fairly high performing interface material.  To compensate for this we tested the card's core temperature under load (as reported by the Catalyst software) with HIS's high output paste, ThermalRight's Chill factor and some generic white goo.  The same five run testing mythology was used here as was with the processor testing.  The CPU and GPU were cleaned with rubbing alcohol prior to changing the thermal interface material to ensure our testing was as accurate as possible.

Test Bed

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (Clawhammer)

• Foxconn NF4SK8AA mainboard

• ThermalRight Ultra 90 Cooler

• HIS Radeon X1950XT IceQ3 Turbo

• (2) 1024 MB DIMM of OCZ PC4000 Platinum GX XTC

• Maxtor DiamondMax 9 100GB SATA HDD

• Lite-On Dual Layer 16x DVD Burner

• Kingwin Absolute Power 600w PSU

• Windows XP Pro SP2

Results

All results are graphed in degrees Celsius with an ambient room temperature of 23 degrees that didn't deviate more than +/- 0.5 degrees during all tests.  First is the CPU temperature testing.

Very very impressive!  Let's see what happens on our video card.

This was a bit of a surprise after such a show on the CPU.  I'm wondering if this is explained in part because of HIS's venerable IceQ3 cooler that is quite frankly a beast.  We can see there was indeed some difference but not as pronounced.

Conclusion

This stuff is for real.  There isn't much to say after seeing that the processor benchmarks showed the ThermalRight Chill Factor paste gave us a 7% increase in cooling performance.  As far as the GPU testing, we ended up with a small increase in performance over generic white silicon paste.  However, I'm wishing we had a card in the shop right now with a less robust cooler so we could put more stress on the cooler which may or may not show a larger difference.

At the end of the day, that's a lot of performance gain for the $6 street price the ThermalRight's Chill Factor goes for.  This is an estimation on my part but I'd guess that the $6 tube would last a good 50 applications.  The six or seven applications I've taken out so far haven't seemed to make a dent in the syringe, so there is a lot of value here.  Special thanks go to Sidewinder Computers for not only sponsoring this review but to turning us on to a fantastic low cost way for anyone to get a significant performance boost.

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