Alas, true snake oil. If only it didn’t cost so much to get bitten.
All very serious jokes aside, it reminds me very much of Arctic Silver and other such fully necessary thermal compounds required to install a CPU properly. Various claims are made and even supposedly independent testing results vary according to the design of the cooler, it’s method of mechanical cooling (air,water nitrogen oxide) as well as the design of the case, fans, PS rating and of course the model number and make of the CPU. But in all cases, when applied properly (different schools of thought exist on this parameter-spreading, pea, X, grid etc.) the undeniable truth is: the results can be measured and regardless of any faults in the above mentioned parameters, the CPU performs better and runs cooler. While it’s quite logical to look at the mating surfaces of the CPU and the cooler’s backing plate and assume the tolerances are so high that there couldn’t possibly exist any sort of deviation that would add up to the inability of the said surfaces to perform their job properly, but you’d be wrong. Maybe at idle, things are OK, but take a high end CPU like an AMD 5950x and put it through its paces via a stress test and the system is likely to shut down completely or throttle itself to snail mode until it’s been acknowledged by the user that the thermal load need attention. I can’t help but wonder if all our less than perfect systems are doing the same? Not thermally, but sonically? Are the little audible shortcomings we notice here and there equivalent to the OS telling us temps on the SB or NB are getting in the way of overall performance? Just makes too much sense to me that CPUs manufactured with the same surface mating tolerances as the enterprise solution big brothers to Threadripper or Xeon (by AMD and Intel) are on an even or even higher plane of tolerances than something manufactured to reproduce music. After all, the entire economy of the world is not riding on a SET.
All very serious jokes aside, it reminds me very much of Arctic Silver and other such fully necessary thermal compounds required to install a CPU properly. Various claims are made and even supposedly independent testing results vary according to the design of the cooler, it’s method of mechanical cooling (air,water nitrogen oxide) as well as the design of the case, fans, PS rating and of course the model number and make of the CPU. But in all cases, when applied properly (different schools of thought exist on this parameter-spreading, pea, X, grid etc.) the undeniable truth is: the results can be measured and regardless of any faults in the above mentioned parameters, the CPU performs better and runs cooler. While it’s quite logical to look at the mating surfaces of the CPU and the cooler’s backing plate and assume the tolerances are so high that there couldn’t possibly exist any sort of deviation that would add up to the inability of the said surfaces to perform their job properly, but you’d be wrong. Maybe at idle, things are OK, but take a high end CPU like an AMD 5950x and put it through its paces via a stress test and the system is likely to shut down completely or throttle itself to snail mode until it’s been acknowledged by the user that the thermal load need attention. I can’t help but wonder if all our less than perfect systems are doing the same? Not thermally, but sonically? Are the little audible shortcomings we notice here and there equivalent to the OS telling us temps on the SB or NB are getting in the way of overall performance? Just makes too much sense to me that CPUs manufactured with the same surface mating tolerances as the enterprise solution big brothers to Threadripper or Xeon (by AMD and Intel) are on an even or even higher plane of tolerances than something manufactured to reproduce music. After all, the entire economy of the world is not riding on a SET.