Prolimatech PK2 & PK3 Nano Aluminum Thermal Compound Review

Legit Reviews Testing System

I will be testing the PK2 and Pk3 thermal paste/compounds with my water cooled computer that is currently using the Intel Core i7 3820 CPU. I will not be including the default CPU core speeds for reasons that while using the default CPU core speed of 3.8 GHz the differences between each tested thermal paste/compound did not provide me with enough temperature variation, this variation was roughly about 1C while using this default CPU core speed of 3.8GHz. So, instead I decided to use a set of strict guidelines that will give me a more reliable temperature variation between each of the tested thermal paste/compounds.

These guide lines will be:

• Each of the thermal paste/compounds will not have a settle in time, the minute the computer booted into Microsofts Windows 7, I immediately started my four LinX runs.
• For idle temperatures I allowed the CPU to throttle itself down to 1.4GHz.
• For full load testing results the CPU will maintain an overclock of 4.8GHz.
• Each of the tested thermal paste/compounds will be applied exactly the same way (for this I used a five dot pattern)
• The target average temperature of the CPU will be no more than 75C, +/- a couple of degrees.

For the testing purposes I will be be running 20 loops on an 64bit version LinX x 4 runs on each of the tested thermal paste/compounds. I will record the highest temperature achieved out of these four LinX runs, on all four cores of the Intel Core i7 3820 CPU, of both idle temperatures and full load temperatures. The program I will be using to monitor the temperature of the CPU will be Core Temp 1.0 RC3. For idle temperatures, I allowed the computer to remain on the desktop for 30minutes after all four of the LinX runs were completed.

Ambient air temperature of the room conducting this review/test remained about 20.5C, +/- 0.3 C.

A list of all of the included thermal compounds used in this review:

• Gelid GC-Extreme
• Antec Formula 7 Diamond based compound
• Prolimatechs PK2 Aluminum based compound
• Prolimatechs PK3 Aluminum based compound

Since I have explained all of the rules and what I will be including as comparison out of the way, its time to see how well the Prolimatechs PK2 and PK3 performs.