Thermal Paste


Most avid readers will probably know by now that all the tests conducted use the same Thermalright ChillFactor II thermal paste regardless of what the coolers come bundled with. However, it is still important to see whether bundled solutions are better or worse than the standard ChillFactor II. The Archon comes with a small 2g tube of ChillFactor III thermal paste and from previous tests, we found the latter to be superior. In this case however, the bundled ChillFactor III strangely generated worse results and retesting confirmed the results. The difference was more prominent at 4GHz with a delta difference of 1.75C. The application was evenly spread out when I removed the heatsink for inspection so the reason for this behaviour remains unknown.

Passive Tests




The Thermalright Archon has proven to be ideal for quiet operation. Taking it one step further, it copes well even as a passive cooler, outperforming even the HR-02 which was purposefully designed for passive operation. It fell short of the Super Mega and no match for its own brother, the Silver Arrow.