Cooler Master IC Essential E1Thermal Grease Review

Package: Purchased Cooler Master IC Essential E1Thermal Grease in May, 2014 from Snapdeal.com for Rs.699. The package includes Thermal grease contained in a ‘syringe’, a plastic ‘spatula’ and a cloth wipe packed in a small sealed plastic pouch.

How I used it: Strangely, the product does not come with any instructions on the manner or amount of applying the grease. I began with removing the caked old thermal compound that came applied to the stock Intel heatsink-fan, with the spatula. The plastic spatula does a pretty good job of removing the old, baked/crusted cooling material from the heatsink and the processor. This was followed by wiping the surfaces clean with the cloth wipe.  For the lack of better words, I can only say that the cloth wipe is soaked with some compound (something like thinner or nail paint remover) which cleans the surfaces neatly. Applied a drop of thermal grease from the syringe to the processor surface and fixed the heatsink [see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cooling-air-pressure-heatsink,3058-9.html for more].

Results: With ambient room temperature hovering around 30 degrees Celsius, my Intel Core i5-2400 with stock heatsink-fan was running at idle temperature of around 60 degrees which shot to as high as 90 degrees when playing games (Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD, LA Noire, Medal of Honor: Warfighter etc.). It even touched 99 degrees once! Temperature was measured using RealTemp and SpeedFan both of which gave identical readings. After applying Cooler Master IC Essential E1Thermal Grease, the temperatures are down to ~45 degrees idling and ~65 degrees gaming. Probably I would invest in a better heatsink fan, but for the moment, Cooler Master IC Essential E1Thermal Grease has done a great job!

Future Use: The syringe contains 1.5 ml of thermal grease as per the product description. Even after using on two processors, I was left with quite a bit of thermal grease. Have stored the remaining grease in a cool place with the cap tightened on the syringe, but I have no clue how long the grease will survive for any future use. As for the cloth wipe, it dried up within hours of opening the sealed pack that it came in, though I had stored it in an empty plastic pill box with lid tightly closed. So the cloth wipe is practically a single use thing I’m assuming.