Results:
Our thermal paste test protocol is very young, it is based on an Intel Alderlake platform with an I9-12900KS and an EVGA Z690 DARK KINGPIN. The tests are performed under the same conditions with a Heatkiller IV waterblock at constant pressure.
Protocol:
The I9 12900KS is set to get 250W of load on cinebench R20. The Pcore are at 5200MHz, the Ecore at 4000MHz and the cache at 4400MHz for a voltage of 1,335V bios LLC +25%.
Thermal paste applications are done crosswise on the CPU, this is the method that works best with all thermal pastes on the market. The waterblock is mounted and tightened to the screw stop to let the springs apply the right pressure.
Then, a cinebench R23 stress test is run to warm up the thermal paste with 10min of heavy load. To finish, three R20 cinebench are launched in a row. While taking well into account to have the same water temperature between each beginning of benchmark.
Each thermal paste is applied three times with three cinebench R20 per application. The minimum delta T° value between the water and the CPU is recorded among these nine measurements.
Results:
As can be seen, this XTM70 outperforms all other thermal pastes. It is true that the gain is only 0.5 to 1°C but it is well ahead. Moreover, we noticed during the application that this thermal paste is very well suited for use on GPUs. We will soon update the protocol with the addition of a test on an RTX 3080 FE under waterblock.
The measurements were made with water at 28-29°C and a flow rate of 233L/h. Here are the details of the best measurements out of nine readings per thermal paste.
Corsair Tool Application:
For our thermal paste comparison, we used the cross application method. This is the best method of application with the spread, but it always provides the same application with all pastes. For this XTM70 that comes with an application kit, we wanted to see if this would save on temperature. The answer is yes, if you are not a virtuoso of thermal paste application. But, in fact, we obtained the same results as with a cross application at 0.1 °C. With a much higher paste consumption and a lot of waste.
