Gold TIM

[smilertoo]

There may be an obvious technical reason for this to be stupid, other than price but has anyone ever tried using gold/silver leaf between a cooler and cpu?

 

[wazza300]

Gold isn't a good conductor of heat far as I'm aware,silver is better

 

[Chrisbes]

Also the fluid like nature of TIM allows it to fill any small imperfections

 

[smilertoo]

Yes silver beats copper, i thought silver leaf might be thin enough to be pressed into the imperfections that TIM would fill.Maybe there was a technical/physics reason such as it burns etc. for no-one doing it. Meh, it was just a thought.

 

[Greebo]

You can get silver TIM paste already with thermal conductivity of 8W/mk so about double what copper based pastes acheive.

The next big thing is meant to be carbon nanotube TIM

 

[Yaayuh!]

Gold is worse than copper. It's all about Diamond and Silver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thermal_conductivities

 

[ubersonic]

The McLaren F1 had a gold plated engine bay to reflect heat iirc.

You can get silver TIM paste already with thermal conductivity of 8W/mk so about double what copper based pastes acheive.

Not dissing whichever paste Greebo's talking about, but for clarity its worth pointing out that the vast majority of "silver" pastes (I.E Arctic Silver 5) are actually 'mostly aluminium' with some silver content and thus perform worse than 'mostly copper' pastes.

 

[Greebo]

Your are right Ubersonic, Artic silver is indeed ALuminium but I was talking about (expensive) pastes made from silver has the major ingredient which are available to buy now.

Carbon Nanotubes explained here

http://www.electronics-cooling.com/...high-performance-thermal-interface-materials/