The apocalypse is not upon us, but with shows like "The Last of Us" debuting recently, it seems fitting to introduce users to alternatives to cooling your graphics card components, should that ever come to pass. Yes, this was an actual test done, albeit not for the reasons mentioned, but it does open up a new way of viewing thermal alternatives if suddenly the world ran out of suitable pastes and pads to keep the GPU cool.
Open your fridges and grab your condiments — it's time to find out which one can cool your GPU better
It isn't good when we have to put a disclaimer before continuing the remainder of the article, but here it is:
PLEASE NOTE: We do not recommend any food products for this test. Only use recommended thermal techniques, or you risk voiding any graphics card warranty.
Now that we got that out of the way, "AssassinWarlord" on the German forums ComputerBase was looking around his workspace, looking at all the different thermal pads left over from various manufacturers, and an idea sparked to mind. The user wanted to see which manufacturers offer the best cooling for his buck and decided to raid his fridge, grabbing thin cheese slices, potatoes, ketchup, and toothpaste.
AssassinWarlord used an AMD Radeon R7-240 that offered a TDP of 30W for his testing and used a 5-minute Furmark test to check to see which offered the best cooling available. One notable feature of this graphics card is its passive cooling which is why he utilized the specific test, as it takes less time for the cooler to be saturated. In addition, the user also placed a fan set at a fixed speed so that the resulting test performance would remain the same in each instance.
A total of twenty-two options were chosen among the food items, as well as thermal pastes and pads from companies like Corsair, Alphacool, Arctic, and others. The resulting temperatures varied throughout the test but did raise some interesting results. For overall best thermal interface material or TIM, the Arctic TP3 thermal pad, which was 1mm thick, offered the best performance of all the official TIMs on the market. Regarding unofficial materials used to cool the Radeon R7-240 GPU, ketchup provided the best performance, keeping a steady temperature of 71°C during the test. The Arctic TP3 thermal pad was also the easiest to remove from the surface compared to the other options. All other condiments, food items, and toothpaste did not equal performance, but again, this is a unique test and not recommended.
We will link to the Computerbase forums so that you can see the full results of the test, as well as some pictures of the resulting food items and thermals used during testing.
News Source: ComputerBase
