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With most enthusiasts trying to get the best cooling and performance ratio on their computers, one might be out of ideas on what to upgrade next. Well, most often than not, thermal paste might be overlooked as an essential upgrade to the overclocking enthusiast.

Introducing from ESG Associate's, one of the pioneers in great thermal compounds dedicated for overclockers, the line of Nanotherm compounds:
Nanotherm Ice II / Nanotherm Blue II
Nanotherm Silver XTC
Nanotherm EXP

First of all, the President, Scott E. Gallmeyer cares a lot for his products and contacted me immediately after his ESG products were not reviewed in my last instalment of the thermal paste roundup. I send my thanks for allowing me the chance to review and test out his great products as you'll read below.

Specs:
Nanotherm Ice II / Nanotherm Blue II:
This is the upgraded version of their Nanotherm Ice and Blue line, basically, both are made of the same except Blue is well, a blue-coloured compound and the Ice is silky white.
· Compound is non-electrically conductive
· Does not dry out

Nanotherm Silver XTC:
Unlike Arctic Silver's line of thermal compounds, ESG has made their compound non-electrically conductive, which is much safer when applying the material to your CPU. It reduces the risk of damage because of over applying the compound on the CPU.
· 99.98% pure silver particles
· 80 to 83% silver by weight
· Contains a small % of the special Boron Nitride and "Nano" powders used in Nanotherm II
· Compound is non-electrically conductive

Nanotherm EXP:
If you are familiar to the Nanotherm line of premier thermal compound solutions, you may wonder what the Nanotherm EXP is. Unlike the other three, this brown thermal compound is thick and solid. As of writing, this has not been made available to the market so I do not have the specs available...however, this is a great compound, and from testing, it seems like this will be where the best thermal compounds will be heading in the future. One thing to note is that the EXP is for an air cooling solution only, for all the water cooling enthusiasts wondering about the compound.

Test Rig:
· Pentium 4 2.26 GHz Northwood
· Running with the Y.S. Tech TMD Socket 478 Pentium 4 fan
· Samsung 1.00 GB PC333 DDR Ram
· Leadtek Winfast A250 MyVivo GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128 MB DDR
· Intel 845GBVL motherboard
· Lian-Li PC-6089 Aluminum Midtower
· Enermax EG465P-VE FCA 430w PS Manual Control
· Intel Active Monitor software for temperature readings

Well, first of all, I used my Arctic Silver 3 temperatures from my last thermal paste shootout to compare with the Nanotherm temperatures. I was very excited when I received Nanotherm's new products in November but realized that by testing all four compounds means it will take some time. Coupled with the site improvement delays, this review took quite some time to accomplish.

I allowed a period of 2 weeks for each compound where the paste would settle in with the CPU and heatsink and the actual performance of the thermal compound would be shown.

Results:

Idle Full load Arctic Silver 3 29.5 41.9 Nanotherm Ice II 28 39 Nanotherm Blue II 29 39 Nanotherm Silver XTC 27 39 Nanotherm EXP 25 37

"Full load" refers to the temperature after running ten loops of Mad Onion's 3D Mark 2001 SE. Temperatures are in degrees celcius.

To be honest, my testing rig was using the Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound before I tried Nanotherm. However, after my experiments, my computer is now using Nanotherm EXP, a compound which is clearly ahead of the competition. Fortunately, the EXP was the last compound I was testing with and it has remained in the testing rig. The bad news with all this is, the compound is still in the experimental stage, but once Nanotherm makes the product available to the public, air-cooled overclockers should be able to rejoice.

One important thing I would like to mention is that Nanotherm products are much easier to clean up compared to the other thermal compounds I have tried. I have yet to clean the Nanotherm EXP from my CPU because of it's great performance enhancements, but the Nanotherm II and Silver XTC were easy and should be seriously considered for someone who likes to change to new heatsinks every couple of months or so.

Overall, this is definitely a Techangel.co.uk Editor's Choice for ESG's Nanotherm Silver XTC and it's up-and-coming Nanotherm EXP. For new enthusiasts out there, it is important to know that thermal paste does affect the temperature quite a bit, and that the extra Celcius a compound is able to cool means the ability to overclock your system in a much more stable manner.

Here's an analogy for justifying the purchase of a good thermal compound; if you're the one that buys the highest octane gas for your car for the better performance, then you should buy the best thermal paste for your computer in order to get the better performance as well, and right now, Nanotherm's Silver XTC is your solution.

(and you don't even have to pay for the crazy gas prices that is going on right now to get Nanotherm's compounds! Visit them at http://www.esgn.com/)

GillianChung

Related:
ESG homepage

Our previous Thermal Pastes roundup