Tuniq TX-2 High Performance Thermal Compound

Installation:

In the current era of newer processors generating less heat than the previous generation, I decided to use one of my PC’s that has a nice little space heater installed. The computer features a Pentium D 805 running a little bit faster than it probably should (3.4 GHz) which I will be using for this comparison. Until now I have been using Arctic Silver 5 on this CPU, so I will be comparing these two thermal compounds to one another and see which one gives me the better temps.

The first major difference to note is that the TX-2 is infinitely easier than the AS5 to spread across the CPU. It has always taken forever for me to get a nice even coat of AS5 on anything because of how thick it is. With the TX-2, I put a glob in the middle of the heat spreader, and using a razor blade spread it into a nice even coat as easy as if I was using cream cheese. (Note that we do not recommend using cream cheese as a thermal compound even though it works incredibly well on hot bagels.)

Another difference to note is how easy the TX-2 is to clean off. A lint-free cloth and some 99% IPA and it easily cleans right off without any residue left behind.

Temperature Results:

Idle measurements were taken after booting into Windows and allowing the computer to remain idle for 30 minutes. Load measurements were obtained by running Orthos Beta Stress CPU test. This test was allowed to run for 15 minutes to ensure that the temperature had stabilized. The test was run five times for each measurement and an average of the five measurements was used for our final results.

Please note that the room was kept at 22°C for this entire series of tests.