I have some KPX but haven't tried it yet. I couldn't resist ordering some because I've heard good things about it and it's not too expensive.
I've been spending a LOT of hours on testing different testbenches and ended up throwing pretty much all of my original methodologies out the window. They just didn't provide the level of accuracy and repeatability that I would expect.
One of the things I actually didn't expect with testing thermal paste is just how bloody unpredictable the changes in temperature are. Basically, you do one benchmark, come back later and then get a different result on the second run. These are the results when I tried a one-and-done approach:
View attachment 198589
The rate of heating (higher value = faster heating) doesn't scale with ambient temperature at all, it's all over the place, so that wasn't going to work. But now that I've taken that into account and have been doing multiple runs per test, the results are waaaaay more accurate with the same testbench:
View attachment 198606
See, what most reviewers do is run a benchmark until the testbench reaches maximum temperature. I wasn't happy with that approach because there's too many issues with it. It takes a long time, the final temperature isn't repeatable, it kicks a lot of heat out into the room which changes the ambient temperature too much.
My benchmark runs are only 2 minutes each and I can evaluate a thermal paste completely in 10 minutes. Better yet I'm able to measure load temperatures to within a tenth of a degree and will be able to adjust results to account for sub-decimal changes in ambient temperature. It should be accurate enough to detect tiny differences in performance between different thermal pastes.