Introduction

There is a lot of discussions about thermal pastes these days. Some people think they make a great difference, and others say the difference is negligible. I, for one, really didn't care too much about what thermal paste I used, as I never saw a difference worth noting. Sure, some hardcore users care about a one degree difference in temperature, but I was never one to care. Arctic Silver claims that their new product, Ceramique, can cause a 2 to 10 degree drop in temperatures. I was skeptical at first, as all other pastes I have tried didn't differ much. Of course, this was before I put Ceramique to the test.

About Ceramique

So what is different about Ceramique? First off, it is not electrically conductive. You can spread this stuff all over your motherboard and nothing would go wrong. That pointless mess would be easy to clean up with isopropyl alcohol. The paste is easily placed onto the core of your CPU via the syringe that contains the Ceramique. There is also a bunch of other technical mumbo jumbo over at Arctic Silver's website, but all we need to know is that it is easy to apply, clean off, and that it works.


Testing

Arctic Silver says that Ceramique will lower your CPU temperatures 2 to 10 degrees from standard thermal pastes and pads. However, they fail to mention if Arctic Silver 3 is "standard." To test if Ceramique lives up to the hype, we are testing it against Arctic Silver's Arctic Alumina thermal paste.

The "test rig" specs:

AMD Athlon 1.4 GHZ CPU
Vantec Aeroflow Heatsink/Fan
BIOSTAR M7VIG Motherboard
512 pc2100 DDR RAM
Geforce 3 Ti200
5 Thermaltake 80mm case fans @ 12 volts

The test will compare idle and load temperatures of each thermal paste. For the load test, we will run Battlefield 1942 for an hour with the highest settings and the "smartest" bots (you will know what I mean if you have played this game). Here is a graph comparing the two thermal compounds:

Ceramique vs. Alumina
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

Idle

Load

Ceramique

Alumina

38.7

40

0

Temperature ( °C )

100

 

 

Idle

Load

Ceramique

Alumina

42

44.9

0

Temperature ( °C )

100

 

 

(Please note that our test conditions will vary from others, and the ambient heat in Texas is sure to raise the CPU temp quite a bit. Use these temperatures and graphs to relate the two products, and don't look at the temperature by itself.)

As you can see from the chart, the Ceramique has a ~1°C drop from the Alumina during the idle test and a ~3°C drop under load.


Conclusion

At first, I really didn't expect much from a new thermal paste. Now after having tried it myself, I can say that there is a definite, worth while difference between other pastes and Ceramique. For me, it's highest selling point is the lack of conductivity, but after the tests, a ~3°C drop in temperatures makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Pros

~3°C drop over Alumina
non-conductive
easy to clean

Cons

none