Introduction

Arctic Silver is undoubtedly one of the best, if not best, thermal compounds for small contact areas. Arctic Silver is a thermal compound made of pure micronized silver, better known as thermal paste that is applied to processor core where heatsinks are put in place to dissipate heat from the chip through the heatsink. Many months ago now, the original Arctic Silver was designed and released for small contact areas such as FC-PGA Intel Pentium III and Socket-A AMD Athlon cores that are produced on a micron size of 0.18 and below; these are classified as "small contact areas".

Arctic Silver has gained wide recognition as the best thermal compound engineer in the world; their flagship product (which we reviewed back in September 2000) is used as a benchmark to compare other thermal compounds. Why stop there? The company Arctic Silver has realized the potential for capturing added market share by introducing Arctic Silver II, which is essentially Arctic Silver with an optimized formula for large contact areas but also with "support" for small contact areas making it a very diverse product now catering for every tech savvy user.