When the sandman comes…
…the children flee. If you move over the sample for a longer time, you can also find various impurities. In the case of Spectrum 28, for example, we see dark chunks that stand out against the round aluminum. It will be interesting to see what’s behind this.
Well, look at that! Silicon and oxygen represent (not only) a crumb of silicon dioxide, i.e. quite mundane sand. Quartz sand is pretty much the most common thing that occurs on the earth’s surface, so you don’t have to wonder about impurities here either. Only it does not actually belong in the thermal paste, because sand and thermal conductivity… Well, nothing is ever quite perfect and so it this, too.
Let’s bite on iron
The last chapter deals with an impurity that may also have found its way into the paste along with the zinc oxide. Let’s take a look at the strange lump (spectrum 37) first:
The high content of iron (Fe), the absence of oxygen (O) and the traces of manganese (Mn) suggest a special tool steel. But what is steel doing in the thermal paste? This could be the abrasion of a crushing tool mixed in with the sand as a free addition. This is the obligatory by-catch, so to speak, which really had no place in Captain Arctic’s fish sticks. But even from the sticks you get the most amazing things from time to time…
Summary and conclusion
We are of course fair and do not publish an exact breakdown of the respective components here. So for the time being, the self-assembly kit will not take place and reverse engineering will also have to take a break today. Something like a heat-conducting paste cannot be protected anyway, because the mixing of commercially available substances hardly has any creative level worth mentioning. Which brings us to snake oil. The MX-4 is certainly not sensational, but it is a solid and thoroughly honest paste. It does what it is supposed to and for quite a long time.
But if time permits (and yes, there is already some stuff in the pipeline), let’s take a look at what makes some very expensive products so unique (or maybe not). Genuine innovation (which we will at least protect from exact imitation in a fair way), snake oil in homeopathic doses, or just pure marketing after all? This is exactly where we want to start in the future with these technical possibilities and at the same time also analyze the surfaces to be treated. Which paste suits which occasion or rather does not? CPU, GPU and cooler, smooth or rough… Discover the (savings) opportunities!
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