Arctic Cooling MX-4 Thermal Paste Review

Arctic Cooling's MX-3 thermal paste is currently one of the best on the market and is favoured by many enthusiasts as it performs very well and is non-conductive.  In fact, KitGuru uses MX-3 to test most of the CPU coolers that pass through our labs.

Despite the numerous upsides of Arctic Cooling's MX-3 paste, there were always two definite drawbacks to the product.  Firstly, the paste is very viscous and is therefore much more difficult to spread than other pastes.  And secondly, the price of MX-3 is notably higher than other pastes, around £7 for a 4g tube at most retailers.

Rather than try to improve the performance of their paste, Arctic Cooling decided to rectify these other two flaws with their latest thermal compound.  Arctic Cooling's MX-4 paste is designed to offer the same performance as the MX-3 paste whilst being easier to spread and cheaper to buy.

The Arctic Cooling MX-4 paste is supplied in almost identical packaging to its predecessor, consisting of a sealed plastic packet.  This allows us to see the tube of thermal paste and displays various features and specifications of the product.

This similarity is also present with the syringe in which the MX-4 is supplied, the only difference being the use of the new Arctic logo and the substitution of a ‘3' for a ‘4' in the product name!  This is no bad thing, though.  The syringe is designed very well and allows us a decent level of control over the application of the paste.  Arctic Cooling have thoughtfully included four circles on the side of the tube which give us an idea of how much paste there is left inside.

Compared to the MX-3, the MX-4 paste is less viscous which allows us greater control over the amount of paste we apply and also makes it a little easier to spread. To illustrate the difference between the two pastes, we've recorded a video of the spreading of each paste.

As you can see, the MX-4 paste (right) spreads more readily than the MX-3 (left).  The magnitude of this isn't very obvious from the video but we assure you it's much easier to get it spread evenly.  This should be advantageous for users who prefer to spread the paste themselves and should allow the paste to cover a larger area for those users who prefer the spot method where the paste spreads out under the pressure of the CPU cooler's block when screwed down.

To test the MX-4 paste we thought it appropriate to use Arctic Cooling's own Freezer Xtreme (Rev.2) CPU cooler.  To apply the thermal paste we used the dot method, allowing the cooler's pressure to spread the paste over the CPU.

The system we used for testing comprised of an Intel Core i7 920 CPU on an Asus P6T motherboard.

Test System

Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Processor: Intel Core i7 920
Motherboard: Asus P6T
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme (Rev.2)
Memory: 6GB (3x 2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 RAM
Storage: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB 7200rpm (HD103SJ)
Power Supply: Corsair HX850W

Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Prime 95 (64-bit)
Everest Ultimate

Room temperatures were kept at an ambient 22c which mirrors realistic temperatures for a wide range of room environments. We left our test system idling on the desktop and after 30 minutes the idle temperatures were recorded. The CPU was then loaded for 30 minutes using Prime 95 and the load temperatures were recorded. The temperatures were recorded using Everest Ultimate and the displayed values were the average of the four cores.

Both the idle and load temperatures remained within a single degree of each other during all our tests which supports Arctic Cooling's claims of retaining the same impressive level of performance.  This single degree increase we noticed in a couple of our tests is a small compromise for the improvements Arctic Cooling have made elsewhere.

Arctic Cooling have retained a very similar performance level to the renowned MX-3 paste whilst improving the other aspects of the paste, making it easier to use and cheaper to buy.  When Arctic Cooling release the MX-4 paste in the near future, we are sure to start using it for testing coolers.

It still eludes us why Arctic Cooling only supply their MX-2 paste with their own coolers.  We would like to see them including MX-4 with all their products as soon as possible because it is a much better product.

As it hasn't been released yet, we can't be sure of exactly how much the MX-4 will cost when it hits the shelves.  It has an MSRP of €3.90 but we would expect to see it for around £4-5 in the UK.  This makes it a steal and it should be considered by anyone looking for some decent thermal compound for their next build.  In fact we love this product so much we couldn't help but make it the first product to score 10/10 on KitGuru – it really is faultless.

KitGuru says: A truly great product that rectifies every issue we had with its predecessor.  Anyone looking for a decent thermal compound should definitely consider this product.

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