Companies place immense amount of time, resources, and money, into making the fastest CPU possible, with the lowest TDP and the most cores. Yet despite this, some people put budget first, and use the stock CPU cooler, and most likely, stock thermal paste. Many companies make their own thermal paste, and even more make CPU coolers. However, often people are content with using stock items. Of course, we all know that to get the best performance that you possibly can get, you need a good TIM. So, today, thanks to Arctic Cooling, I’m here reviewing the Phobya He-Grease and thermal paste cleaner. So the item for review is a set, I believe, of Phobya TIM kits, as I shall call them. It comprises of some Phobya HeGrease Extreme, and a Phobya CPU & GPU Cleaning kit. From the outset, I was incredibly pleased with the look of the packaging for the ‘HeGrease extreme’ The blister pack has a picture of some kind of monstery thing on the card inside, akin to the Aliens vs. Predator posters that we saw littered about the place way back in 2004. The packaging makes for some rather brash claims (Which I hope to be true) that this is ‘Created for Extreme Users on highest level’ and that it ‘Achieves the best heat conductivity from your CPU, VGA, or even Chipset to your cooler.’ I was also pleased to see that the package contained a spatula for spreading the goo, which, without wanting to sound to state the obvious, it is also of high quality - there is not a single seam on the spatula, and it’s really comfortable to hold. The ‘CPU and GPU Cleaning kit’ is a bit less impressive, it seems. As a kit, I would’ve liked to see it come with some kind of anti-static cloth as well, but we only get a small bottle of cleaning solution. This is the first disappointment of the day, as there are no instructions, (You could say ‘do you really need instructions?’ but they should be there) and what text is on the bottle, is tiny, and is impossible for me to read, and I’ve always thought my eyesight was pretty good. It also doesn’t taste very good - It said to seek medical advice if swallowed, however I found the taste went away after a couple of glasses of water. My Rig for testing today comprises of: Fractal Design Define R3 (stock fan layout) AMD Phenom 2 X6 overclocked to 4.0ghz Asus Crosshair IV Formula Coolermaster V8 / Arctic Cooling freezer 13 Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste (Also known as AS5, Hilarity shall ensue) Irrelevant items comprise of- Asus Radeon 6970, 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 RAM, 64GB Crucial M4, Samsung F3 1TB, Samsung DVD Burner. My testing today is taking place with the Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler, currently equipped with AS5. The ambient temperature of the room is 18c, at a pressure and humidity of an arbitrary number that no-one really cares about. So, without further ado, let the testing begin! Installing the new thermal paste was a mundane task, as it should be. The spreader that came with the tube of goo spreads the compound badly, but, it’s a rather shallow thing to take marks off because of- most goo’s don’t come with a spreader anyway – as the pressure of the cooler on the CPU usually does the trick. Whether spreading the goo made a difference, I’ll never know, as I feel that I may have perished due to boredom if I compared temperatures with and without spreading of the paste. Thus, with the fresh goo, I did spread it, but didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. To obtain accurate and fair results, I took 3 sets of temperatures for each setup, for each cooler, thus meaning that I have a load and idle temperature for high and low speed fans on the CPU coolers. Therefore, each CPU cooler has 4 temperatures associated with it. The first test I conducted was with my already installed arctic silver 5, and with my Coolermaster V8. As we can see from the graph, the AS5 gives a good showing, considering that the CPU is overclocked to 4.0 GHz. On its lowest fan speed setting, the V8 managed to give idle/load scores of 40c and 63c respectively. Once the fans were turned up to their maximum, the idle/load temperatures went down but a not insubstantial amount, yielding 39c and 57c. After switching my AS5 for HeGrease, my temperatures seemed to drop dramatically. With my V8 on its lowest speed setting, It managed an idle/load temperature of (a frankly brilliant) 37c/64c respectively. When turned up to its highest setting, the HeGrease achieved 35c/56c, which is so much better than my AS5 that I checked it 10 times. This really is very good. (The Freezer 13 results are compiled in one graph due to time/space constraints) The Freezer 13 provided less conclusive results. At the lower fan speed setting (Fan speed reduced to 50% using speedfan) The he-grease managed to outperform the Arctic silver by 10C at idle. There was no change in load temperatures. At its highest fan speed setting (100% in speedfan) the He-Grease produced slightly higher idle and load temperatures. I will conclude this review by saying this. Phobya has made a decent effort with the He-Grease. It provided slightly better temps than the AS5 in a lot of my benchmarks, but that’s not surprising given the difference in price point - the difference could be due to the age of my AS5, although that’s not the conclusion I want to draw. If you’re reading this review, for goodness sake, don’t read any more reviews for thermal paste. Spend the time looking for a better CPU cooler, there’s always the chance that you’ve missed one. As for your choice of Thermal paste, it’s the only thing I’d recommend buying on instinct. Anything you get for around £5-£8 will be as good as you need- I don’t think that the small performance difference warrants the cost and time expense needed. That concludes my review of the HeGrease, but I’m also going to add the TIM cleaner into this forum post. TIM cleaner is something I’ve not really felt that you need. To my knowledge, rubbing alcohol works just fine, or small amounts of white spirits - I was sceptical of the use of a ‘TIM Cleaner’ However; I was pleased with the results that it produced. As you can see, it did a fabulous job, to the point where the CPU looks brand new - also with the CPU cooler. It didn’t have the polished look that a brand new cooler has, but it did look very clean. The cleaner was very easy to use, despite a distinct lack of instructions. I don’t know exactly what it does, but it was better than using alcohol, it made the TIM very easy to clean off with toilet paper. At this price point, I can wholeheartedly say that this is well worth the money. It’s contains much more than I’ll ever need, I think I could clean about 20 CPU’s with it- in my opinion, every PC enthusiast should have a bottle. I’d like to thank Aquatuning UK for sending me these samples for review. Any questions, feel free to leave a post below, and I’ll try to answer them all.
