 YouTuber Tech Ingredients made some pretty bold claims recently saying that their homemade thermal compound can outperform commercial solutions like Arctic Silver. So naturally, immediately after that video drop, we received dozens of emails asking us to test it out. I mean, Arctic Silver has silver in it. Could anything be more conductive than silver? Tech Ingredients sure thinks so. So we got our hands on it, and we are going to be ready with full attention to all the warnings trying this out. And the video is brought to you by Aorus. The Aorus 15G features an Intel 10th gen processor with strong battery life and performance and tons of features. Check it out today at the link in the video description. The craziest part of this is not only does Tech Ingredients say that this will outperform a commercial solution, he also says that you can make it at home as long as you've got some dendritic copper, epoxy, graphene, diamond, and access to a high-powered ultrasound or a cell disruptor. We just went ahead and paid the 20 bucks or whatever it was to have him send us a video of this. So, we're going to be using this to test it out. And we're going to be using this to test it out. So, we're going to be using this to test it out. Now, I'm really excited to test this, but there is one major caveat. Now, I'm really excited to test this, but there is one major caveat. As is laid out in the instructions, this bond is permanent, meaning this is more like a thermal epoxy and less like a thermal paste. So, when I was putting together my test bench for today, I had to consider a couple of things. Number one is I needed something that output enough heat that I was going to be able to tell the difference between my reference thermal solutions over here and the tech ingredients thermal epoxy. And number two, I needed a test bench where I wouldn't be too choked up if my CPU was permanently bonded to the bottom of my cooler. So, I chose an AMD FX8150. This thing was known for being an absolute inferno of a chip and not real fast. And this thing, this is the Thermaltake Black Widow SpinQ, I'm not actually sure what it's called. It seems to have two names, Universal CPU Cooler. Been a while since I've dragged the old crosshair four out of mothballs. One thing that I went and grabbed is some of these Noctua cleaning wipes. Normally, I'm pretty loosey goosey about the way that I clean CPUs in between thermal paste applications, but because we're actually trying to measure the difference in performance between thermal pastes, it's pretty important that we do a great job of cleaning our CPU here. Let's get some RAM installed, throw a period appropriate graphics card on here. We're going to start with what I'm expecting to be the least performant thermal interface. This is the Innovation Cooling IC Graphite Thermal Pad. And to be clear, I'm not saying it's bad, it's just that the sales pitch for these pads is that they're reusable and they don't make a mess. Not that their performance is right up there with the top thermal pastes. So we just plonk that on there and we're ready to mount our cooler. Oh, I actually lied to you guys a little bit. I think this is going to be the least performant thermal interface. Let's try this one too. This is the included thermal paste with this kind of cheapo cooler. One thing that's nice about using an AMD CPU for this that uses the clip-based hold down is we're going to have identical mounting pressure on all of our thermal interface materials. There's no real room for user error because you can't over or under tighten it. To make our lives easier, we're not going to bother with idle temperatures. That's not really where the men get separated from the boys when it comes to thermal solutions anyway. So let's go ahead and fire up a classic stress test for a classic CPU, smallest FFT, eight threads. And then we're going to wait until the CPU temperature reaches about a stable point. And we're going to go ahead and we're going to click this clock down here to reset our average values and let it run for two or three minutes. 50 degrees under load qualified as inferno of a CPU. Now we've got, you know, the Intel 10th gen. I'm a little rusty on my FX overclocking, but about 4.5 GHz with about 1.42 volts or so. After some trial and error where we got reacquainted with the FX8150's 70 degrees Celsius maximum temperature, we settled on 1.475 volts with turbo disabled and 4 GHz clock speed, giving us about 68 degrees under load with our thermal pad. So now what we're going to do is reset our timer and take an average over about two minutes. After a little over two minutes, we've got no thermal throttling and average temperature of 67.7 degrees Celsius and a maximum of 69.1. Nice. Now for our next thermal compound. This is nice. We don't have to clean it because all we had on there was one of these thermal pads, but we're definitely going to have to clean it after our next attempt. What do you think Andy? Quality thermal compound or the gross included garbage? Let's do the included garbage. Let's do the included garbage, baby. Now at this point of the game, I could wait around for the temperature to reach equilibrium or I could take nature into my own hands. By running the CPU at effectively what is a greater ambient temperature, we can cause it to heat up to approximately where we think it's going to end up and then it should normalize a little bit sooner. It's a free tech tip. See, look how fast it's heating up. The system works. Meanwhile, Steve over at Gamers Nexus with like liquid nitrogen pots. Wow, I knew that these thermal pads were optimized for convenience rather than performance, but dang, even the generic stuff included with our heat sink is at, what's my average here? 60.1. Now I'm really not sure what to expect from a quality thermal paste. Are we going to drop like another seven degrees? I kind of doubt that. I always forget about this, even though it's actually the reason I chose an AMD chip, because obviously once the CPU and the heat sink are glued together, I'm not going to be able to get at the release mechanism. So I wanted something that worst case scenario, I could just yank out of the socket. You got to twist, ladies and gentlemen. There, that's better. Let's get this bad boy cleaned up. These Noctua cleaning cloths are next level. That is a clean FX CPU, ladies and gentlemen. No harm, no foul. Do we really need to use two high quality thermal pastes? I think just one is fine. Do you want Noctua or MX4? Noctua. All right. So I want a very similar amount, but I'm also going to make sure that I spread it out. Man, it's weird seeing the old green AMD logo. Here on the desktop, the shortcut is the old green logo. I totally forgot. It used to be green. And then they started competing in graphics. And it's like, oh, well, we can't have team green and team green. Bang on, Andy. 59.1. You nailed it. One degree better. Before using this product, you might want to review some principles of using thermal interface materials demonstrated in our tech ingredients video. Wear gloves, protect your work surface with some disposable plastic film. Contact with epoxy can irritate the skin. Got it. After preparing and cleaning the surfaces, remove the caps on the syringes and eject the quantity you plan to use. The mixing ratio is three parts, large orange syringe and one part small black syringe. Watch out. The orange syringe is more viscous. So you'll need to be a little bit careful to get the right quantities here. Too much. Dang it. They even warned me. I knew this was going to happen. Does that look about twice the size of my orange ones? What do you think? Okay, we'll do three more orange ones. Good. I love sciencey instructions written for scientists. Stir the components thoroughly until the color is a completely homogeneous dark brown. And then mix for another 30 seconds. I'm going to use this plastic McDonald's knife. Homogenous dark brown. Wow, it's kind of grainy, which I guess makes sense, given that it's made of like little grains of diamond graphite and dendritic copper. Okay, we're going to mix it for another 30 seconds though. I'm very specific about that. I am going to follow instructions for once in my life because this stuff seems like serious science shiz here. Wow, it really starts to thicken up a bit there. Interesting. Okay, that seems like about 30 seconds more of mixing. Wow. All right. Cool. Apparently we've got about 45 minutes before we can't work with it anymore. Now we need to put a thin layer of this stuff on each of our surfaces. This is not the best spready spreading tool. You know what? I'm just going to use my glove. So those are on there. Now get this. There's an element to the instructions that I actually didn't read until now. Once they're on there, you're going to want to grab a fingernail-sized piece of medium sandpaper and abrade the epoxy mixture for a few seconds into each surface before placing them into contact. Oh yeah. Here's some 400 grit sandpaper, which I guess is medium-ish. This hurts me so much. We're going heavier, guys. I made the mistake of following the written instructions without looking carefully at the video instructions, and it seems like he put it on much, much heavier than I expected. So I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to mix up a whole bunch more, and we're going to try and get this on there before it cures. So we're going heavier here. We're going heavier. Here we go. I guess this is the part of the video where I acknowledge that we shot this over a couple of days because of that whole issue with the 69-degree thermal limit. So I'm putting this on as far as I can tell correctly from Tech Ingredients' video. Obviously, he didn't apply it to a CPU, but hey, that's what you guys need me for. It's definitely on there. Andy, what's going to happen? Kaboom. No, what's actually going to happen? You think it's going to outperform the paste? I think so. It's glue. It's thermal glue. Dendritic copper. Diamond. Now, I hate this when you've got one dirty finger from what you were doing before, and you've got to wash your whole hand, you know? I'm just going to take it to 59 because then we're going to see whether it keeps going up or goes down. This is interesting. It's a good thing we left a little bit of headroom between the thermal pad and the 70-degree thermal throttling limit because you can see here, we are actually in between pad performance and that 70-degree limit with the epoxy. Fortunately, we're not throttling, so this should be the same amount of thermal output, and our result should still be valid. I spoke too soon. During our two-minute run, we thermal throttled. You can see all these cores dropped down to 1.4 GHz. They ramped back up. You can see we're running at full speed now, but it clearly was outperformed by every other solution we tested. Now I kind of feel bad about the way I presented the intro because I had intended to seem skeptical, but I actually thought that this was going to outperform it. I didn't mean for this to just be like dunking on their thermal compound. It's the next day. It occurs to me that maybe our thermal epoxy doesn't perform at peak efficiency until it's actually hardened. So we're going to fire the machine back up. I let it sit, not running, because I wasn't sure how having it be hot would affect the curing, and we're going to take one more crack at it here. Just checking the numbers from yesterday, I think it's going to perform quite well compared to them. I want to see a nice flat line before we start our two-minute run, though. It starts out high from our heat gun shortcut, then comes back down, and now it's creeping its way back up again. I'm trying to wrap my brain around this behavior. How can you have the same thermal interface material in there that performs differently over time? It seems to be very clearly doing that, though. Maybe Tech Ingredients could do a follow-up explaining this. I'd love to know, like, is it expanding? How long should it take to reach equilibrium? I'm disappointed. I was ready to come in this morning and say, Huh, well, stupid me, I shouldn't have been testing it before it was cured anyway. But we're actually seeing pretty much the same behavior at this point. We just touched 68 degrees for the first time a little while back there, and you can see we've got a pretty consistent trend upward. Right as I was saying that, it thermal throttled, so two of our cores dropped down to 1.4 GHz. We can't give it a temperature score at that point. That's just a fail. So, if thermal performance is worse than even our graphite pad, it's safe to say I won't be recommending Tech Ingredients' thermal epoxy for your CPU anytime soon. But it's also safe to say that they never recommended it for that either. It's for situations where you cannot use a higher-performance thermal grease. And you know what? I think my expectations were probably a bit unreasonable here, but given that the only reference that I had for its relatively high performance was a competing thermal epoxy that nobody in their right mind would put on a CPU, I just didn't really have a frame of reference, and neither did you, so I can understand what you guys wanted me to test it for. All I can hope now is that its performance as an epoxy is disappointing, and at least I can get my CPU back. Okay, I think it's glued, but as we've seen before, it should still be possible to pull the CPU out of the socket. There we go. It looks like, A, we definitely had enough to cover the entire IHS because we've got that seepage all the way around the edge, and B, we've obviously got a fair amount of mounting pressure on here, because otherwise, why would it seep out from around the edges there? Remember how I was able to twist off the old thermal paste? Well, the epoxy component works. Shucks. Ah! Oh my goodness. Look how durable this stuff is. Scratching at it with a knife, and it's not even entirely coming off. I know sometimes blunt force can be better for cracking epoxy. So we have no choice but to keep going. Enter the power fist. Oh! Wow. I think it's kind of a 30% chance this thing still works after what just happened to it, but what happens now if I just put like a thermal pad on it? Oh, wow. That's bent. I'm not even going to try to mount it properly. I'm just going to see if it, you know, posts. Well, the CPU still works. I mean, we can never, you know, use it for certain kinds of testing anymore because it's covered in epoxy, but at least I can give it back to the inventory guys, knowing that my inventory checkout sheet is clear. Just like I'm clear to segue into our sponsor, Manscaped. Manscaped is featuring their new Weed Whacker nose and ear hair trimmer. 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