As we all known - well, since GeForce GTX 580 we do - the thermal paste is one of the most important parts of an extreme overclocking configuration. The difference between bad and great paste can easily be up to 200 MHz. For a while now, Gelid GC-Extreme is considered to be king of the hill when it comes to thermal paste for extreme cooling purposes. A title it took from the legendary OCZ Freeze a while back. Yesterday, Der8auer published the final results from his quest to find something even better than GC-Extreme. You can read the full report in the forums: CLICK.

His conclusive lines:

Let's start with the best products of this test. Both JunPus D9000 and Gelid GC-Extreme are great products and reach the lowest temperatures possible. Both products come along with applicators but I prefer the packaging of the D9000 however it's a little harder to apply than the GC-Extreme.

Alpenföhn Schneekanone, Prolimatech PK-3 and Noctua NT-H1 also have a pretty solid performance. Alpenföhn's Schneekanone means snow cannon in English which pretty much applies to its performance. It's quite expensive but the performance is good even on very low temperatures. The content of the tube is quite low but this can be good if you are using it just for one system. Prolimatech PK-3 is a solid product for air cooling and deep temperatures up to -50°C with a great packaging. Noctua's NT-H1 convinced me in all three categories and the packaging is also very well designed. Both 24/7 overclockers and extreme-overclockers can use this product without compunction.

Cooler Master IC Essentials E1 offers a great price/performance. The cleaning cloth which is included in the delivery is a very useful tool and I hope other manufacturers will add this to their products. Akasa 5022 also offers a very good performance in all three tests and I can recommend this products for air- and water cooling as well as for 24/7 overclocking. JunPus DX-1 is also very interesting for 24/7 overclocking and extreme overclocking at temperatures of about -50°C. Taking a closer look on the test table you will notice that this product has the highest thermal conductivity with 16 W/(m*k) even though it did not achieve the best temperatures in this test. According to JunPus the DX-1 has a very long burn in time and will evolve the high performance after a few days of usage. Due to lack of time I could not test this unfortunately.