After many speculations about which impact thermal pastes have when overclocking at really low temperatures I decided to test it out.
To get some good results I produced a simple dummy heat load consisting of five power resistors developing around 36W each (180W total). This should be close to what a cpu produces under these conditions.
The setup consists of this dummy load with a F1EE standing on top of it (figured the weight was enough). One thermal probe is attached to the base of the pot and the other to one of the power resistors.
The thermal pastes tested were Arctic Cooling Ceramique, OCZ Freeze and Antec Formula 7. The results were the following:
Temperature delta:
As you can see Ceramique is terrible all the way, the Antec is doing very good however failing when temperatures are reaching around -50*C. The OCZ is clearly the winner but something particular happens at around -165*C. The dummy load temperature suddenly starts increasing. The temperature delta increases from around 50*C to 70*C and stays there until I went back to around -50*C pot temp.
I'll try to get my hands on some more thermal pastes to find an alternative to the Freeze which is EOL.
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