 thermal paste yes it doesn't make for a very interesting unboxing but thermal paste is important without thermal paste your system just plain wouldn't work and Arctic cooling makes some of the best thermal paste on the market their MX1 turned the entire thermal paste market which is I mean it's small but turn the entire thermal paste market on its ear because it was the best performing one out there and it was a non metallic compound so previously the the best regarded thermal paste out there was Arctic Silver 5 I mean there were some more exotic things but it was generally acknowledged that without metal content a thermal paste couldn't be a top performer like I said MX1 turned that all around and this is the fourth iteration of their MX series of thermal compounds MX1 had some disadvantages one was it was extremely thick it was very hard to spread which made it kind of inconvenient to apply and MX2 addressed that so Arctic cooling keeps taking their product which has consistently been a top performer in the marketplace and improving it so MX4 right here features a syringe with a cap whoa look at that high technology and and viewing holes so you can see how much MX4 is left in the syringe without any difficulty okay so incredibly they don't compare MX4 to their previous generation MX3 although they do compare it against a bunch of other products on the market lower is obviously better for cooling and they show it against Prolimatech PK1, Gelid GC2, Cool Laboratory, Liquid Ultra that was one of those exotic solutions that used to be quite well regarded okay it is a non metallic thermal compound which means it is non conductive non capacitive even if you get it all over your stuff which is still not recommended because total mess to clean up it will not ruin anything unmatched performance so they're saying it is the highest performance formula available durability it is non curing and non bleeding which means it does not need to be replaced for up to eight years and if your system is actually eight years old and you haven't done anything with it well it's probably time to you know think about doing something different anyway that's another disadvantage of older thermal compounds was that they needed to replay be replaced every couple years or they would actually dry up or they would and not be usable anymore non curing also means that it doesn't have a period where it's not fully functional yet like I said some of the older thermal compounds did have disadvantages one of them was that they wouldn't be a hundred percent of their total performance until they had been through a couple of heating up and cooling down cycles so MX one and any of the later generation MX products do not have that disadvantage so it's recommended for CPU GPU and any power semiconductor components so basically anything that produces heat and has a heat sink you want to put this between it don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos including thermal compound unboxing videos