Arctic Cooling MX-2 review

Here is a small review of Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal compound for processors, which I have been using in my computer for past couple of months.

Few months back my Core2Duo E4500 processor started overheating and would touch 90 degrees with prime95 running for a couple of minutes and would easily touch 70 degrees while running Age of Empires 2!

Needless to say, this had me worried and I thought of giving a aftermarket thermal compound a try, before going in for an expensive and in my case, needless, aftermarket cooler for the processor (I do not overclock my processor).

After reading various reviews and taking opinions from various computer forums, I decided to purchase Arctic Cooling MX-2. Mainly because it didn’t have any burn in period before it could reach maximum effectiveness and neither was it electrically conductive (not really a good thing if you are a bit sloppy), which was the case with Arctic Silver 5.

Applying Arctic Cooling MX-2 was quite easy, I just placed a small glob in the middle of processor (about half the size of a pea) and securely fasten the heatsink and fan (which took some effort thanks to Intel’s stupid design) and the effect was immediately apparent. There was a significant drop in idle as well as temperature under full load.

While the idle temperature had fallen by 2-4 degrees, full load temperature was down by around 15 degrees and temperature while playing Age of Empires 2 was down by 20 degree centigrade!

Two months down the line, the above figures have remained pretty much unchanged and while I was earlier running the CPU fan at full speed all the time, I am now running it in PMW mode and for majority of the time; it is at 50% speed than what it used to run on earlier.

Overall I am quite satisfied with the performance of the Arctic Cooling MX-2 and would give it 5 out 5 stars.