Blisteringballs posted:
Rezist posted:
AS5 is conductive, where I think MX4 is not. I think MX4 works better but AS5 will suffer from less degradation.
Other way around. AS5 is non-conductive (electricty-wise, it conducts heat of course). I don't know the particulars of why conductive pastes degrade faster even in the absence of a current, but whatever.
I also called it conductive and I guess that wording is wrong... this is from their website.
Quote:
Not Electrically Conductive:
Arctic Silver 5 was formulated to conduct heat, not electricity.
(While much safer than electrically conductive silver and copper greases, Arctic Silver 5 should be kept away from electrical traces, pins, and leads. While it is not electrically conductive, the compound is very slightly capacitive and could potentially cause problems if it bridges two close-proximity electrical paths.)
So the better word is capacitive I suppose. It's got metal in it though and like the warning says, should not be used near traces, pins, etc. That is why I will not use this on GPUs and CPUs without heatspreaders usually. Arctic Silver makes Ceramique for this reason and it works well enough.
AC MX4 doesn't include metal and is safer to use if you have an accident (use too much, have a drip, etc).
