Another poo-pile on the shelf?
Bleh ... they keep developing those "new formulas" out there, marketing every next product as better than the previous one. I bought a tube of MX-3 when it hit the shelves. Wiped the MX-2 off my CPU and put the MX-3 on - it was sh!t at perfomance. Gave it a break, let it settle for two months - still sh!t, compared to MX-2. I read posts on the Internet from people saying they'd just opened their brand new tubes of MX-3 only to find out that the stuff had decomposed. Is it coincidence that AC are releasing MX-4 so soon after MX-3? I mean look at the gap between MX-2 and MX-3. Maybe this time around their R&D department got overpaid and decided to compensate for that by working extra shifts, thus the lightning-fast development of the ground breaking new product? Oh, look, it's MX-2 with a fancy new sticker. MX-3? Ah, sorry, that was a secret military experiment, accidentally gone loose. Officially it's a toothpaste and cement mixture meant for constructing buildings on Mars.
Anyway, I'm (and I guess a lot of you out there are too) still perfectly fine with using MX-2, Arctic Ceramique and Arctic Silver 5 - those three rock! But MX-3? Not a chance.
Would I buy MX-4? Yeah, right. Best thermal grease, IMO, would be the one that once applied onto the CPU, would grind and polish the surface like acid super-finish does, then do the same to the heat-sink, and then evaporate, so it would give us the perfect 92~98% direct metal-to-metal contact between CPU and HS. It's what makes the most sense to me. And when you dismantle the heat-sink for maintenance purposes, all you'd need to do is apply some non-aggressive flux onto the CPU, so it would wipe out any greasy smudges your fingers might have left and thus you'll have the same metal-to-metal contact when the stuff evaporates completely too after a 5-minute session with IBT, for example.
Just my two cents. Or do I deserve a bunch o'
for saying all that?