Thermal Paste vs Thermal Pad - Why don’t we use these??
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ต.ค. 2021
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If you’ve ever built a PC, or watch tech TH-camrs enough, you’ll know of thermal paste. It’s the grey goopy stuff you spurt onto your CPU before you plonk a big cooler on top. Sometimes the cooler has some pre-applied, sometimes you need to add some yourself, but either way it’s kinda messy. If you take the cooler off you have to wipe it all away and apply new, fresh paste. It can leak everywhere - and don’t get me started on how you can find thermal paste fingerprints everywhere around my house - so what’s the deal?
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Thermal Paste vs Thermal Pad - Why don’t we use these??
• Thermal Paste vs Therm...
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The material used for thermal pads makes a huge difference on the thermal conductivity. Grizzly Minus Pad 8 is a perfect example. And the main issue with thermal paste is that you can’t use it for filling large gaps between heatsinks and components. 3 an 4 mm thermal pads can do just that.
paste works well for almost everyone in almost every general situation, very specific pastes are made for exotic situations. graphine pads are for people like reviewers that are going to swap out the cpu constantly and dont need the absolute best liquid thermal connection, just a consistent one.
most pastes will last a really long time. ive pasted my cpu with some artic silver 5, and ran it with out issues for 5 years straight. so long as you aren't jostling the connection, even if it dies out, it's far more connective thermally than air, but if you crack the dry paste, air gets in and thermals take a dive.
so changing the paste depends on your circumstances. if your pc doesn't get moved, is isolated from vibration, the thermal compound will last a really long time, while graphine pads wont dry out, and as long as you dont break something while moving your pc, it could be used in situations where paste would dry out and crack. though they make even better pastes these days that claim to never dry out, but it most certainly will, it just takes a lot longer.
Watched a million thermal paste videos and none of them gave your explanation.
Thank you !
...''Stick with the thermal paste for now''... That summarizes it. Thanks!
I've only ever bought one tube of thermal paste and it was MX-2 about a decade ago. It's been fine ever since. The thermal pads are useful for little devices like my raspberry pis, when attaching little metal heatsinks.
lol, sounds familiar. I've been using the same 20g syringe of MX-4 for about 8-9 years now. Looks like it's about half full now.
Wait, I was told that thermal paste can’t be stored more than 3-4 years in the tube... is one one trying to sell me more paste needlessly?
@@thelowmein9143 My CPU is 32°C at idle and rarely gets even up into the 60s after hours of gaming, so I guess that the proof is in the results 😀
Replace to the GD900-1, GD007 or GC-Extreme, Noctua NT-H2. Thermal Paste ftom Arctic was a good 15 years ago for 2 core processors. If you really want to reduce the temperature then use a Honeywell PTM7950 for CPU, GPU core and Laird Tputty 607 for vrams.
@@thelowmein9143 The paste will age over time which will affect its thermal conductivity performance, practically every chemical will break down eventually. However as long as it doesn't harden in the tube and can be used, I guess it's okay. My 4gr MX4 finally runs out after 6 years from purchase date, don't seems to have noticeable difference but I would assume there will be slight performance different compared to brand new batch though.
I seem to see quite a bit of combinations of both for some reason.. Light paste with pink thermal pads. I personally wonder over the tradeoff of filling tiny non observable gaps and crevices with further insulating material as opposed to a tighter more firm metal to metal connection where these macroscopic gaps are just filled with air via compromise. The best option to me seems an extremely thin layer of paste to simply fill gaps without actually providing more insulation between the surfaces which do almost perfectly mate.
The only thing I picture while you're talking about the TIM is: The verge paste application. Cheers, mate.
Don't forget your tweezers!
@@TechteamGB And screw with confidence!
Just found this video after wondering why a Dell M.2 SSD I was working on had that pad. Thank you for explaining clearly why that is!
Because use the bottom aluminium panel for cooling and if was just paste will dry very fast and there got little moving. Every time when you lift or move the laptop you will see a bit moving of the back panel. About that there is very elastic pad. In some cases there must have two different pads with different thickness. Like SAMSUNG 980, because the surface have a different thickness. And when you use just one pad on the thinner area the pad may be not reach the aluminium panel and stays wormer. The original one is very thick and may be enough. But you can't be sure.
Thanks a lot for this explanation, it's much clearer now
From the perspective of engineering, the heating pad is matched with the irregular surface of the material from the engineering perspective. It uses high-performance thermal conductivity and eliminates the air gap, thereby improving the overall thermal conversion capacity and making the device working at a lower temperature.
Quick question you might be able to answer ... I just purchased an Arcade1up Big Buck cabinet the PCB has a cooler with a fan and uses a thermal pad to cool the chip ...
Would it be better if I used thermal paste instead?
Yes you can, from results latest thermal paste can last even 7 years that's what they say
The REAL reason that the Pad is so much worse is that it canNOT conform itself to FILL the tiniest gaps, as the semi-liquid paste can!
that's literally what he says in the video
@@ImmortalChanger What pepeshopping tried to say is that on top of the fact that thermal pads prevent the metal surfaces from making direct contact, also the thermal pads themselves don't make perfekt contact with the metal surfaces, allowing air to get trapped at both sides of the pad, similar to bubbles under a strip of tape. It's probably the reason why some folks put a thin layer of thermal paste under their thermal pads.
@@DC9V That's actually what I was thinking. Just coat the surface of the CPU with thermal paste, and coat the surface of the cooler contact with thermal paste, then have the pad sandwiched between the CPU and the cooler contact
@@DC9V the whole purpose of the pad is to be temporary and reusable. Putting paste on it completely defeats the purpose. And if you're going to put paste, there is no point in having a pad
@@HenryOfGnarlia good point
Very informative, how do you rate the pre applied paste you get on some coolers, to me they almost look like those pads
I can't say I've run any quantitative testing, but from a qualitative view I'd say they have tradeoffs - it's a very even application which is generally better than you'll get with DIY paste, but it's also a bit thicker (consistency, rather than Z height) than most pastes you apply yourself. It's also not always going to be the best performing compared to something with higher thermal conductivity. For beginners I think it's great, takes the knowledge/guesswork out of PC building, but might not be quite as good as high end 'aftermarket' paste.
*Merci de nous expliquer par la théorie l'efficacité de la pâte thermique et des Pad. J'avais besoin de le comprendre, et du coup je vais parcourir votre chaîne...*
Bon travail.
play this at 2x
1.25
Haha
Its BETTER WTF.
You could do a test with Arctic MX-5 paste vs Honeywell PTM7950 phase-change thermopad.
Best video I watched on you tube for simple basic know how of this topic
Thank you
the best video of this kind i've seen till now very advising
I opened my 10 year old laptop and I saw that on its cpu and gpu had paste on but on two other chip-like black components that were also covered by the heat sink had some pads. So I was wondering, can I replace everything even those pads with paste ? Or is it only for the metal parts ( those black chips look like some plastic material )
I just put a pea sized drop in the center of the cpu and then apply the cooler as even as possible. Seems to work very well and Core Temp shows good temps.
I have been usinge IC Graphite Pad on my 16 core 32 thread Ryzen 3950x with Noctua d15 air cooler and also on my 11900k Cpu for years. I record weddings and other events so I have to edit and render a lot. Thats the only thing I use my computers for almost every day, and I have not been dissapointted by the Thermal Pads.
I use the Innovation Cooling Graphite Thermal Pad and it's only 1 or 2C hotter than paste so it depends on the pad that you use.
Yep, I've been using IC's pads for the last five years instead of paste and prefer them overall. I've built four PCs with them during that time and am happy with the performance and the convenience.
@@KaitainCPS can you tell me how to find good thermal pads? i kinda not like the paste, it is toxic and clean this shit once a few time is even worst than clean it constantly, because you not see all dry parts falling, soo some toxic shit can be where it not can be... I'am loking for thermal pads with this 1 degree difference to shift for good, but need to understand how to choice those and this video not helps, only put people against new techs LOL
ok but there's also 12-15 W/km thermal pads that are also very thin, can you test those vs thermal paste?
Like which
I'm using a graphite pad (its an Innovation cooling graphite thermal pad) on my cpu and it performs better than a lot of paste. Max temp when gaming is 60c and the average temps is between 42c and 50c mostly.
Have you used PTM7950 by honeywell? its non conductive
@@ClaysonWood my laptop came with it pre-installed (legion 5)
There is graphite on the ground
I had to sand the heat sink flat. I did 11 passes in X 's cleaning the paper on each pass. Not sure why the pits it's made out of copper. It could be an electrical reaction to the silver or something, I'm not sure. I had to clean the processor with a razor. I'll see if I help with the thermal throttling I was having. The same thing with my AMD FX-8120 heatsink it is copper and it's getting light pitting. Could some heat sink grease prevent that, I think the corrosion over time is creating a gap?
I have a new mini pc with a plastic cover on top of an N100 cpu. It's fanless, so I'm worried about heat. The top cover is a sort of micro waffle grid design. It's uneven and i want to place an old cpu heatsink on top of the plastic cover to help with excess heat. The bottom of the large heat sync has a copper base, and won't cover the whole cover. I'm guessing the paste may be a bit messy and i was considering a heat pad. I also see adhesive heat tape. What do you recommend? Thanks for the video.
thanks for the info about these pads I was about too buy them at Amazon, IL just get the thermal Paste instead
Hi guys. I'd like to use these in a vacuum. Do they out-gas? Silicone based thermal pads do.
Can i use both Paste and Pad , Like putting paste on both sides of pad ? Would it make any improvement than worst result ?
Really good video with very helpful information, helpful information that I haven't heard in any other videos so far -- without any distracting nonsense music either, like so many dumb videos these days. Can you tell me how many grams of past I'd likely need for the heatsink in a Dell Inspiron 7559 gaming laptop? Thanks.
From testing videos I've seen from the likes of JayzTwoCents and Gamers Nexus, too much paste does not hurt performance. It just has diminishing returns.
can i put thermal paste instead of thermal pads (not on cpu, gpu) but on those lesser heat generating components.
How durable are the pads? 3, 5, 10 years?
so basically if using a thermal pad, it is ALWAYS better to use the thinnest possible , right ?
Dearest sir, your data it is well but, ¿What about Pertiel electric pads, could help in MacBook Pro and Air to cold it better?
I bought a thermal pad for my 2015 MacBook Air because I want to see how cooler I can make it and when watching youtube at 1080p with Sonoma. It runs 10-15°C cooler. I put the thermal pad on the heat sink itself, a few on small components and on Apple proprietary NVMe SSD.
very well presented👍
Very helpful. For the first time at all I paid attention to W/mk factor and realised, that even the best acquirable thermal paste should indeed be applied in... well, that's tricky now. There should be as little of it as possible, because it does disturb and does stand in the way, but in the meantime there should be quite a lot of it (in the microscopic dimension), as the actual, true connection between the core and the sink is only seemingly good - good to our eyes only. Anyway, the layer should be apparently thin as air, yet filling everything to the top. Now, the question (rethorical question) is what is the construction provided distance between my laptop processor delicate ceramic core, and the heatsink. I suppose there must have been some reasonably slight gap provied and I bet they didn't let the copper touch the core any firmly.
Thankyou man
With thermal pad, when you pull out the air/water cooler, you also pull out the cpu.
El thermal pad se pega al disipador de calor? Es que la pasta térmica se me pega al disipador de calor y quiero evitar eso
The funny thing is that Sony put thermal pads on Playstation 2 that I opened recently for restoration in 3 chips. I might remove the pads and put thermal paste instead.
I was thinking could Thermal pad be decent enough for an old Pentrium III 1Ghz cpu. I use that old Desktop for Retro PC game that does not even exist on Gog or steam but on disc.
Hello. My question is: Are there any other recommendable alternatives to thermal pastes and thermal pads?
I'm building something using thermoelectric peltier coolers, and I want to attach finned heatsinks on the cold sides for better heat distribution. But the heatsinks must face downward, so I need them to really stick to the peltier modules. Thermal pastes are not adhesive though (ofcourse if I use enough, the heatsinks will stick but the problem with that is obvious). What other options do I have?
MX-4 suffers from pump out, particularly on laptop dies, but I've seen it on high wattage 3080s also. MX-5 performs better. Thermalright TFX takes the cake for high temp dies, but requires soaking the syringe in hot water for proper application. If you're able to maintain consistent temps like for example on a custom loop, then pump out may not be a concern with MX-4. Small Form Factor builds on air would fair the worst.
If you ever consider repasting:
For long-term stability and high thermal performance almost nothing beats Honeywell PTM7950 paste sheets.
Honeywell PTM phase-change pads are better than basically anything you're going to replace it with. My first highly recommended choice is the PTM7950 sheet (i found and got them from ebuy7). Otherwise Thermalright TFX, Shin-Etsu 7921-5, IC Diamond, Maxtor CTG9, Highly viscous pastes but even with those a repaste within 5 months might be necessary.
Kryonaut and many other popular pastes work great on desktop CPU's but are not very reliable on gpu's and direct-die with high temperature at 80'c and above. It starts with great day 1 temperatures and rapidly declines after a few weeks/months.
Hard to spread high viscosity pastes works best on those situations, and that's the reason why pre-applied factory paste is thick.
Placing links results in the removal of my message (Probably a YT naughty bots protection policy)
Google: PTM7950 Legion 5
paste go in into holes of cpu and transfer heats more effective while pads do not go into the holes of the cpu but still transfer heat into the cpu fan but not as effective as the paste (theoretically)
What do you guys suggest for ps4 and ps4pro? For processor and for the other chips,its suggestive to take out the small pads and put paste?
I installed a thermal grizzly pad on the cpu and replaced the thicker pads on the memory with newer ones. Made it a lot quieter.
BTW, put your CPU box horizontal before aplying the paste.
Both solutions are intended to grout the holes in the thermal interface. One does it much better.
Looks like I’m repasting my CPU today when my MX-4 gets here
Something has to give cause I've changed the thermal paste about 5 times on my ps4 pro and it goes back to being a jet after 1 month.
Great vid
Best thing ive ever used is ultrafine copper foil
As a fire and forget solution graphene pads will become more viable as prices will go down with wider adoption. I like you prefer thermal paste as I love to tinker and change components and let's face it it's satisfying to maintain your hardware at top performance.
@techteamGB , i got this stupid idea for a video.
Put a drop of liquid metal on a pad and measure temps?
In theory it should make heat transfer better, while not spilling because of being retained by pores in graphene 😅
Testable?
Just FYI the material to look for is Graphene not graphite. It’s 1000 times more thermally conductive than any material on earth. Including silicon and copper. It’s also electrically conductive which means you have to be very careful when installing it in certain cpu sockets.
Why didnt you test with the thickest pad? Hmmmmm
I just used the pre-applied thermal paste that came on my DeepCool AK400. It was applied on there perfectly and I'm only running an i5 12500 which this thing is straight overkill for anyways lol. I have a tube of Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut too, it wasn't worth cleaning off the factory applied paste to use it. A lot of people overthink this stuff, even end up damaging their components from taking their heatsink off over and over in pursuit of 1-3c lower temps.
tese pads are for the memory chips, not fo rhe cooler... for the cooler pads have 0.2 mm tickness
So, the thermal pads haven’t improved any since I saw reviews from a number of years ago.
They have, he used the version for application on vram not on cpu. I have been using thermal grizzly carbonaut for a year and its slightly worse ( 2 c ) but nowhere near as these ones
What if you applied thermal paste then pad then paste?
Nc idea
Tell me one reason you are not using a 0.5mm pad and instead, use a 1.5mm pad. These pads are for gap filling. The 0.5mm would work better. Maybe not like the paste, but 3x times better than the 1.5mm pad.
the thickness doesnt matter as much as the surface of the pad
Get ptm7950 pads and it works almost as good as liquid metal.
Paste all Day Long for Me ... Your Graphs show the prof is in the Pudding ... Do You rate Thermal Grizzly ??? Cheers for Vid
Oh to have a diamond paste
Paste. 1st build. Intel Core i5. Artic 360. RX-550 GPU. Only a rice sized amount ? Some else said bean sized.
nort . nort 262?
Also those pads are arctic pads are EXPENSIVE
Im going to sand it down and make them even. 👍
Thermal pad with not rated thermal conductivity ? Toothpaste is better ;)
you are a fun bafon pal
i think pad is good to put inside phone battery cover
At first I was like, yeah... yeah... pads.. great idea........... NOPE. Not when I saw the result.
I am gonna use a sheet of silver
U got a very steady hands ✋
Im going to try copper paste 🤓🤔
Am going to use brush paste
@@dopedrip3491 whats that?
@@johandodenedgren7557 bro autocorrect toothpaste 😂
@@dopedrip3491 hehe ah, make much more sense xD
@@johandodenedgren7557 👽
WRONG. Too much paste does not make any difference. Tested in Linus Tech Tips. Also put paste and mount the cooler in the horizontal position.
Thermal paste is inherently not as good a conductor of heat as metal. Linus messed up.
If more paste made no difference, then how come metal paste works better than ceramic paste, hmmmmm?
What's gonna happen when all that excess metal paste squeezes out onto the surrounding mobo, hmmmmm?
More paste is NOT better
Cpu +tharmal paste+ thermal pad +thermal paste+ cpu cooler , i am curious to know the result
Same result as if you used a whole tube of thermal paste. You want as thin a layer between your heatsink and CPU. As the video clearly explains, the paste is only to help fill gaps.
@@ForlornDevil i did ,result was not impressive but I got high temperatures
You only need a layer of paste as thin as scotch tape (hint, hint). That's it!! Anymore than that is wasteful and performance hindering.
we can make 6nm chips but not flat chips ? 😂
They say that if using the pads to cover the whole CPU is like using a whole tube of thermal compound, what about trying the pad cut into a size of a pea, or grain of rice and putting it in the middle? try it like that please.
dude, seriously? what you think it will do with that air gap? it will just make bigger air gap around your "pea" OMG!
@@virtual.artOfficial 😹
Obviously you misunderstood. Using a pea of liquid material means it spreads a very thin layer over the CPU when the heatsink presses down on it. Pads are solid and will not spread.
it's weird that the western world only covered the reusable graphite thermal pads, whereas the mention of thermal pads in china would refer to something like a honeywell 7950 phase change pad, which I'm pretty sure is not reusable but still heck of a lot better than something like kryonaut. As of writing this comment on 17th of march 2022 there is not a single video on phase change pads on youtube. weird
i haven’t seen anything on YT either but saw some Reddit tests and reviews, that phase plaster legit, i think i’m gonna have to order it and repaste my Gigabyte G5 with it
You got me. I found honeywell ptm 7950 on Chinese forum, then searched on TH-cam hoping to find a some review, only to find no one is doing video on that but everyone is talking about regular thermal pad... I am thinking about buying one ptm 7950 and use it on my 2080ti windforce's GPU DIE because I am tired of replacing thermal paste, especially on the GPU.
@@toml9566 wow, mines also a 2080ti, don't want to worry about thermal paste drying out anymore
Try to put liquid nitrogen
The pad is way too thick. Results would be better with a .2 or .5 mm pad.
Use a better thermal w/mk pad and not a 6...
Great content!
Is this a sponsored production?
If not, why your end result is totally different form the current vastly published independent reviewer's result???! 😱🤔
i suspected that was the case lol i've got an I9-9900k SOOO i won't be trying a cut down pad on such an expensive cpu but was an entertaining thought though
Bonk toothpaste is better than all
Walter Jr?
Try a 0.5mm pad instead of a 1.5mm
kurugag kamot nimo bords oi... cge siguro kag kuan ba
indium foil
I'm worried about the likes...
i built a tower pre covid gigabyte z-390 mobo I9-9900k 1050watt psu and was built for an rtx 3090 and liquid cooled with a custom loop used a 99 civic rad&fan new of course quick steel puttied the outlets drilled and tapped them and used nylon fuel line the pump and car rad fan have their own power source because i wanted as much of the psu for the 3090 i used a fuel pressure gauge to measure if i had flow or not in short i'm an automechanic and also do info tech so i merged the two techs and works pretty well lol have a nice space heater lmao ....in the winter months anyway tell ya trying to find a 110volt to 12volt 30amp was a royal pain in thee a$# but it runs my fan and pump just fine the tower runs my 970 just peachy and should be set fora few yrs atleast if i can ever get the evga kingpin hydro copper i want for my rig that'd be grrrate but maybe i'll wait to see if they make a 4k series [:-) what the hell i've waited this long and have a decent Gpu so what's the rush [:-)
Listening to this was like pulling teeth. The guy talks so slow.
i actually got incredibly mad watching you apply the thermal paste on the CPU in the UPRIGHT position
NEVER apply thermal paste in the upright position. it gets EVERYWHERE
0:24 if you are this sloppy installing thermal paste, you shouldn't be allowed to build a pc. lmao
You used the wrong pad to compare to thermal paste.... so it wasn't apples to apples... you should have used the thermal grizzly pad against the thermal paste.
The thermal pad was obviously not installed correctly. I've used them for years (different brand) and there's never been any results even close to this...unless it was applied incorrectly. This video is just bad.
Pads are usually used for gpus not for CPUs
Someone didn't watch the video...