Test setup

All of today's testing has been run on the following:

- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- 4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair PC6400 DDR2 RAM
- Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5
- 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive
- Sony DVD-ROM
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
- Arctic Cooling MX-2 thermal paste
- Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste
- OCZ Freeze thermal paste
- 1000W Thermaltake Toughpower power supply
- Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit Edition)

CPU cooling performance

Now we get on to the real test - Just how much does OCZ's Freeze thermal compound improve the CPU cooling performance of a system?  To test this, we've employed our Intel test system to see how the application of Freeze compares to using both some generic thermal paste, as well as Arctic Cooling's MX2 and Noctua's NT-H1 compounds, in each system.  To compare the properties of each type of paste, we've examined the CPU temperature first from idling at the Windows Vista desktop for a few minutes, then again after running the CPU-intensive Prime95's in-place FFT stress test for a thirty minute spell to produce the maximum amount of heat possible from the processor.

Let's start off with our idle temperature readings, where we can see the temperature of each CPU core in our Core 2 Quad system:

We see some early promising results from the Freeze while idling at a Windows Vista desktop, as it exhibits overall cooling performance a couple of degrees lower than the other third-party thermal interface materials we've tested of late.

Once we fire up a multi-threaded version of Prime95 for a half-hour period, OCZ's Freeze really comes into its own, noticeably reducing temperatures to a truly impressive degree for thermal compound alone.  In all honesty, the numbers speak for themselves.