Liquid Metal Compound LM ships as a syringe with a capillary applicator tip. Best Premium (Standard) Thermal Pasteįor a compound that costs less than half as much as leading competitors, Phobya's Liquid Metal Compound LM offers impressive performance, often besting the the CoolLaboratory Liquid Pro or Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut in our tests. Keep in mind that you don't always get what you pay for as some budget pastes come awfully close to or overtake their more-expensive competitors. Here are the best thermal pastes, along with our complete test results.

We'll also have MX-6 in for testing soon. We'll keep the MX-5 listed, but be aware that once the existing stock is gone, this favorite will no longer be available. We recently learned that Arctic will retire its ever-popular MX-5 paste, one of the staples in our recommendations below, as it makes way for the new MX-6. Both of these new pastes will make it to our test bench soon, but we have plenty of tested pastes for your perusal.Īs new pastes arrive, older pastes also get retired. Cooling mainstay Corsair also has a new XTM70 blend that will be heading to our test bench soon, showing that the TIM market is still thriving. Long-time TIM-maker Cooler Master also just introduced a new purple CryoFuze, and Alphacool also recently introduced its Apex thermal paste. In fact, long-time PC cooler-maker NZXT just entered the market with its first paste, the not-very-excitingly named NZXT High-Performance Thermal Paste. Most, but not all, traditional pastes are electrically non-conductive.Įven though there are a dizzying array of different thermal pastes available - some blends have been around for longer than a decade - new formulations still come to market at a surprising pace.

In contrast, traditional thermal paste compounds are relatively simple for every experience level.

They are very hard to remove if you get some in the wrong place, which would fry your system.

Liquid metal compounds are almost always electrically conductive, so while these compounds provide better performance than their paste counterparts, they require more focus and attention during application.

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