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Anybody used thermal pads rather than paste ?

gooober said:
My worry is using too much or too little lol. Is there much price difference between non conductivity and conductive? It will be ny first time doing it so it's just nerve wracking as if I get it wrong iam worried about it ******* jy pc up as I cut afford anything lol.
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I always just use to much on purpose, so then I know its fully covered, there's no downside to doing it. Steve from Gamers Nexus did some test's and basically proved it doesn't matter much. As long as its not a conductive paste its fine, don't worry about it.
 
Always use non-conductive thermal paste, unless you are going to nail varnish the surrounding area of your CPU. Most thermal paste are non-conductive unless you use liquid metal ones.
 
0h_no_not_again said:
Just for everyone's reference, thermal pads can have quite exceptional performance on CPUs and GPUs.

As a material the thermal pads have ~5x the thermal conductivity of thermal paste:
I personally haven't tried the pads, however I would expect good and very reliable performance.

To quote Puget Systems

The thermal pad degraded after several re-uses however. So if a thermal pad is used once it should perform the same as paste, it is quite expensive to do it that way.
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I think that high thermal conductivity quoted is for only one dimension, ie. horiztonally and can not be directly compared.
 
Alan1969 said:
I think that high thermal conductivity quoted is for only one dimension, ie. horiztonally and can not be directly compared.
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It's the standard unit for thermal conductivity - it is designed to be directly comparable between different materials. W/mK expresses the amount of heat that will be transferred through 1 cubic meter (1mx1mx1m) of the material in question for every 1C degree of thermal gradient across the cube of material.

To get W/K, you need to take account of the area and thickness. So you can argue that the thicknesses of the paste and pad differ, however, the paste has to be 5x thinner to perform as well thermally as the pad. It's obviously way more complex than this where surface finish, flatness of mating surfaces, normal forces are important, but people dismissing thermal pads for their performance are wrong.

Dismiss them for being expensive!
 
Oh no, I think Alan has a point ... I distinctly remember there being discussion on thermal pads and their directionality of heat transfer.

Pads are not a solid/consistent material but made up of woven structural material such as carbon nanotubes etc.

In the article It came down to the make up of the carbon nanotubes and their orientation in relation of the thermal gradient. In essence many thermal pads have them lying flat in the same axis plane as the pad as a whole and thus leading to the comment of very good horizontal transfer, but less so vertically. Linus Tech Tips did a video trying out the pads and they clearly commented on this aspect of the pad too.

One of the advertised features of the thermal grizzly carbonaut pad was that they were able to make more of the tubes in the material be orientated vertically so to speak, and so increase the thermal conductivity in that vertical plane.
 
Donnie Fisher said:
Oh no, I think Alan has a point ... I distinctly remember there being discussion on thermal pads and their directionality of heat transfer.

Pads are not a solid/consistent material but made up of woven structural material such as carbon nanotubes etc.

In the article It came down to the make up of the carbon nanotubes and their orientation in relation of the thermal gradient. In essence many thermal pads have them lying flat in the same axis plane as the pad as a whole and thus leading to the comment of very good horizontal transfer, but less so vertically. Linus Tech Tips did a video trying out the pads and they clearly commented on this aspect of the pad too.

One of the advertised features of the thermal grizzly carbonaut pad was that they were able to make more of the tubes in the material be orientated vertically so to speak, and so increase the thermal conductivity in that vertical plane.
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Interesting. Have never heard of such a thing, but I'm certainly no expert.
A real shame that Puget systems didn't provide the results of their testing that showed thermal pads gave the same performance as thermal paste.
 
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