Arctic Cooling MX-2, Indigo Xtreme, and Spire SilverGrease

Thoughts and Conclusion

Not much to say so far, Indigo Xtreme and MX-2 have both been tested in all my previous TIM reviews, so there’s not much new news. Indigo Xtreme basically doesn’t care what kind of contact there is–it will fill in during reflow.  Arctic Cooling MX-2 and Spire SilverGrease definitely do care about contact, and both also have a bit of a cure.  Spire SilverGrease looks like it’ll be a modest value with MX-2 disappearing from the market, but its performance is also not comparable to MX-2–there’s a niche that MX-2 will leave behind that is open for the taking.  Fact is, these three TIMs were chosen largely for their value in comparison; MX-2 is extremely popular, Indigo Xtreme is known to be the best on the market, and Spire SilverGrease is what we’re using in our future CPU Block, Air Cooling, GPU Block, and Motherboard Block Reviews.

As for overall judging, with so much data it’s not exactly easy.  No one data point is the most important for the majority of the users and not all the data points are equally important.  So what we’re going to do is reintroduce Relative Performance Scores of the TIMs.  This time it’s a weighted average of the three contact settings’ 75th percentile mount temperatures.  It’s a single data point trying to encapsulate a lot of performance data points so it’s not perfect, but we think it’s a really good mix and will end up representing the TIMs well in the simplest way possible.  For a more advanced look at the performance of all the TIMs, there’s always the dozens of other charts showing the intricacies of the TIMs’ performance.

Next round in the TIM Comparison 2011 will include CoolerMaster IceFusion (as the final ‘reference’ TIM), Arctic Silver Matrix, and Prolimatech PK-1.  Should be up in a few weeks and at that point we’ll also open up a Master Comparison post that will be updated with all the newest results as the test continues through 2011.