Cheap Thermal Compund

A

I RMA'd my motherboard and will be getting it back in a few days. The thermal compound on my cpu fan is all dried up. I need to buy a cheap thermal compound ONLINE. So please suggest me a low cost alternative. Which of these is the better one?
Cooler Master Thermal Compound HTK-002
Cooler Master IC Value V1 Thermal Compound Grease Paste

C

go for AC mx2 or mx4 or tuniq tx4
Tuniq TX-4

ARCTIC MX-4

Yep get the mx4

Z

Arctic Silver 5 is great.

Cooler Master HTK002 is cr@p, get this: Cooler Master IC Value V1 Thermal Compound Grease Paste - RG-ICV1-TW20-R1 | eBay

This is a bit better: Deepcool Z3 1.5g Thermal Grease CPU Heat Sink Compound | eBay

Beware of certain thermalpastes. They are good at start, but then after few months the paste becomes dry and hard, hence creating issues. Noctua does that. Maybe its due to the ambient or made for those who have systems in significantly lower temps- dunno about that. If you want the most long lasting, nothing beats ceramique pastes. They're pretty okay when it comes to thermal efficiency but it lasts for a very long time.

Newer MX-2- in that white packaging. Avoid. the thermal paste is too liquidy and I had to use more than what I usually do to get about half the thermal efficiency the older one did. Too bad one doesn't get OCZ Freeze now. There's a paste called CM Thermaltake Fusion 400. I am not sure how REALLY good they are, but take a look.

The Sorcerer said:
Beware of certain thermalpastes. They are good at start, but then after few months the paste becomes dry and hard, hence creating issues. Noctua does that. Maybe its due to the ambient or made for those who have systems in significantly lower temps- dunno about that. If you want the most long lasting, nothing beats ceramique pastes. They're pretty okay when it comes to thermal efficiency but it lasts for a very long time.

Newer MX-2- in that white packaging. Avoid. the thermal paste is too liquidy and I had to use more than what I usually do to get about half the thermal efficiency the older one did. Too bad one doesn't get OCZ Freeze now. There's a paste called CM Thermaltake Fusion 400. I am not sure how REALLY good they are, but take a look.

Must be a bad batch, I had been using Noctua NTH1 for an year now, no issues, temps actually have decreased a few degrees over first few months and had stayed pretty consistent.

Maybe, but a lot of initial lots and the ones that came with Noctua U12PSE2 when it was brand new was bad and eventually degraded. 6 people- 3 of the end users in Mumbai itself- have faced that issue- one of them even had a tough time cleaning it out.

Or it could be that it needs something better than Cool Dry place to store. That could be a possibility too.

C

Tuniq TX-4 is one of the top notch paste but applying it to the proccy is a real pain in the a$$ it took me about 2 hours to spread that thing but performance s simply outstanding. buy this if u able to find that in market

tkin said:
This is a bit better: Deepcool Z3 1.5g Thermal Grease CPU Heat Sink Compound | eBay

^^ This one is a good mid-range TIM.

@The Sorcerer: Using Noctua NT-H1 for ~2 years which came with D14 and yet to face hardening problem.