Zaward Super Thermal Grease HSC-G

Introduction

Ever heard of Zaward? Nor me, but today I have one of their heatpastes; Super Thermal Grease HSC-G. While it may sound like a cheesy musical, lets see how it performs.

About Zaward

Zaward Corporation was founded in 1996 as the sole worldwide agent of Globefan Technology Co., Ltd., one of the leading manufacturers of DC fans that established since 1986 in Taiwan to provide major personal computer power supply companies with the best quality products.

For the efforts over the decade, the company has built her reliable reputation and gained clients’ trust on her high standard of engineering and well-developed quality control system.

As the company grew, it put together the thermal solution R&D team and started work on big OEM projects mainly from German and Japanese electrical companies. With full support from Globefan, the company has consistently met the strict demands of its customers.

While technology is progressing rapidly, reduction in costs are always called for. Due to market changes, the company has decided to promote their own products.

In year 2005, Zaward & Globefan setup the new R&D centre; thermal solution lab in Taipei, Taiwan for OEM customerized project and for its own product development.

At the same time, the new noise lab and wind tunner have installed in China factory to fulfill our research and development for high technology, more advanced products. Meanwhile to have the complete test equipment for more strict quality control and application purpose.

Specs

Application	CPU, VGA, CHIPSET
Durability	Stable performance in 10 years
Property	No bleeding and evapouration
Thermal Conductivity	~6W/m k
Operation Temperature	-50C ~ 170C
Composition	Silicone / Metal Oxide
Electric Conductivity	Insulation
Net Weight	2g

Zaward Heatpaste

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The HSC-G is set in a heat-sealed clamshell packet; my worst enemy. After attacking it with a pair of scissor I was left with the contents; a syringe and a paste spreader.

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The spreader is remarkably similar to the Nano-Diamond Jetart heatpaste we reviewed earlier, as is the size and shape of the syringe. There are no complaints about this as the Jetart spreader is the best tool for making sure that your core is completely covered with the contents of the syringe.

The syringe is long and narrow giving you the impression that you get a lot more for your money than say Arctic Silver. In actual fact, you get more with AS than with this stuff, and you get a meagre 2g of it. Unless you plan on plastering your walls with this stuff, it should give you a good ten applications before you’ll have to buy some more.

In order to protect your components from short-circuiting, the HSC-G heatpaste is completely non-conductive, according to the packaging. It also doesn’t evaporate and won’t bleed (i.e. pour out the sides of the heatsink). Once you have applied this stuff, it should be good for 10 years, which is far longer than the average computer life, especially in the performance market.

As this stuff is marked as no bleed, I have a feeling that it’s going to be difficult to spread on your core, much like the Akasa AK-460.

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On the back of the packet there are some confusing graphs that compare the heatpaste against stock and Zaward’s other heatpaste HSC-W. Apparently, over 3 weeks (according to the title, yet 3 days on the X axis) this stuff is 12 degrees better than stock. Does this mean that it takes 3 weeks/days to set or are they taking an excessive average? The graph below is even worse, which simply has two lines corresponding to both Zaward heatpastes, yet the axis’s are not marked. The Y is obviously temperature, but what does the X stand for?

Installation

‘Installing’ heatpaste is easy. Simply clean the core and the heatsink base, and spurt some on. The HSC-G is no different.

The included spreader is meant to make things even easier, with the ability to spread the paste so there is a thin layer of paste that completely covers the core.

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Unfortunately, as predicted, the paste is difficult to spread as its no bleed. This means that the paste is scraped off rather than spread on. It’s not quite as bad as the Akasa, but it still makes the included spreader pointless.

In the end, I just put a blob in the middle and squashed the heatpaste out when I put the heatsink on.

Testing

To test, I’ll be putting the HSC-G against the Nano-Diamond heatpaste by Jetart, Arctic Silver 5 and Akasa 460 all underneath a ThermalTake Max Orb which is on top of an AMD 3800+ AM2 processor.

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I’ll put the paste through the normal testing procedure which consists of the following:

Let the core idle for 30 minutes with nothing running, and record the end temperature.
Start both StressPrime on both cores and a single instance of folding@home.
Let the testing run for 30 minutes and record the end temperature.

Ambient was a constant 23C.

Zaward Super Thermal Grease HSC-G

As you can see, this is the worst heatpaste that we have reviewed. While there is only a minor difference of 4 degrees between this and Arctic Silver 5, the gap between this and Jetart’s Nano-Diamond invention is huge. With a clear 6 degree difference under load and idle there are many reasons why this has happened.

I would be surprised if the compound itself was this poor, and so I would guess that it’s the way that the heatpaste has to be applied. As its thick, it can’t be spread like thinner compounds, this means that you can’t get a consistent thin layer on your core and hence the area that the compound covers is smaller. A thicker compound also means that the molecules are likely to be bigger and hence not fit into the tiny grooves in both your processor and heatsink further reducing its heat transfer ability.

In order to test this theory, I applied Arctic Silver as a blob and then as a thin layer and there was a clear difference of 2 degrees, proving that the way heatpaste is applied affects its performance.

If you had a mirror finish on both your CPU and heatsink then the results might be different.

I quickly tested how electrically conductive this stuff was and the answer is 0%.

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Conclusion

The pastes’ plus points include the amount you get, the non-conductivity and the included spreader. Unfortunately, the viscosity renders the spreader useless and quantity far from overrules quality.

Stick with stock pastes for an equal performance and give this stuff a miss.