| Thermal paste performance depends on many factors such as application method and quality, bond-line thickness, contact surface and quality, total mounting pressure and pressure distribution, heat load or heatsink type. Therefore, comparison results can generally vary from setup to setup. Moreover, particular setups with their respective properties such as contact quality between CPU IHS (integrated heatspreader) and cooler base (gap sizes, pressure concentration) or mounting pressure may favour one thermal compound over the other. |  |
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When comparing high-end pastes such as NT-H1 and NT-H2 where the differences can be small on some setups, it is also crucial to strictly control all parameters and tolerances because otherwise, the margin of error may be bigger than the actual difference in performance, which will produce misleading results. In order to reduce the margin of error, it is crucial to do multiple applications and average the results. |
