whether it's your laptop your PC or your phone personal electronics get hot and
we're always looking for new ways to make them more comfortable to use which
led us to a fascinating new trend on Reddit some Intrepid users have been
buying industrial grade cooling pads and putting them in their laptops and the
more I learned about these things the more I needed to know see the thing is
they go on like a normal thermal Pad but
they're designed to melt as soon as your device heats up then return to a solid
state once it cools and this is without seeping out and frying your circuits
like we've seen with other exotic thermal interface materials but there's
always a catch isn't there yes there is
and PTM 7950 here has got a few of them
and I'm going to show you what they are but first I'm going to catch you off
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PTM 7950 comes to us from multinational conglomerate Honeywell and while it's
designed for industrial use and they don't sell it directly to Consumers
there are obviously ways to get it as
evidenced by the fact that I'm holding some and by this post we found on the
framework Forum where user Michael underscore Wu posted some impressive
thermal results after swapping to PTM 7950 from a more traditional thermal
paste and right out of the gate the spec sheet raises some serious questions most
importantly what the heck is a PCM or
phase change material well simply put it's a substance that can change from
one state of matter to another you know like how a liquid like water becomes
solid ice when cooled or gaseous steam when heated with that said the fact that
water can do it is an indication that changing phases is not that special what
is special about this particular PCM though is the temperature at which it
changes from one phase to another its melting point is 45 degrees Celsius
which happens to be a perfect sweet spot where it would never accidentally melt
in a controlled environment like a manufacturing plant let's say but
pretty much the second an electronic component started to do any real work it
should immediately begin to change from a solid to a liquid dramatically
decreasing its viscosity aiding thermal transfer it's not that different from
the operating principle of liquid metal whose biggest Advantage aside from being
metal and therefore very thermally conductive is that it is so thin and so
viscous that it's able to easily fill any tiny air voids between your CPU and
your heatsink air is an extremely poor
heat conductor which is why our fluffy retropolar fleece is so great at keeping
you warm before we go any further I want to see this thing in action because I'm
just curious like how much exactly does it melt what do you feel in Brandon a
strip or a square hip to be square
oh spoke cut my thumb off there it's
like oh oh no all right I didn't do it right okay let me give it a little stick
then for a comparison we'll take some regular old nth2 maybe I'll just kind of
spread it around a bit or something I don't know sure
um can confirm fire is hot and let's see
what happens to the my little pens here
oh we're already at uh
around 75 degrees 16 45 okay
oh it's starting to sweat Brandon come check this out
given the surface it's sitting on is well over 45 degrees that's not as melty
as I expected it to be why don't we give her a little more juice
okay now she's liquid come check this out see that
actually I think we might have gone a little too far it's uh
greater than 130 degrees
two is still quite pasty I mean that's not really as
liquidy as I expected it's certainly different than it was before but we've
been informed that it's at its most liquid when it's under pressure which
would be the case if it was installed between a heat sink and a processor
okay
see oh yeah it get Interesting Man the
second you touch it it does get quite liquid there we go
oh oh my cold stick was carrying away too
much of the Heat it does turn liquid
that was super interesting but it doesn't necessarily indicate that
PTM 7950 is going to work well so for
our performance comparison we obtained not one but two samples of PTM 7950 from
two different sources and I will explain more about that later for now we just
want to see this phase changing in action versus a standard thermal paste
to start with we'd recommend storing it in your fridge for at least a couple of
hours before you begin maybe you could keep it next to your photo film it helps
make the material a little bit more workable the first thing you'll need to
do is clean both the core or heat spreader of your processor and your
cooler then after measuring the approximate Dimensions cut up your pad
with a pair of scissors you don't have to get this exactly right because PTM
7950 is non-conductive and shouldn't damage anything if it seeps over the
edge next peel one side of the pad and we recommend sticking it to the
processor rather than to your cooler apply pressure evenly over the pad to
help with the next step then peel the other side with a pair of needle nose
pliers or or tweezers finally install your cooler compared to my experience
with liquid metal particularly clean up if you make a mistake this was not bad
but there's no doubt in my mind that it is a lot more finicky than just
squirting out some thermal paste even in an unmelted State I feel like the term
PAD is being used pretty generously here
PTM 7950 seems to me more like a thin
layer of schmoo between two pieces of plastic film that make it a little
easier to work with and by a little easier I really do mean a little easier
but if the performance is good enough we
know that enthusiasts won't hesitate to go through a process like that so to
find out we sent this knock to Edition RTX 3070 over to our lab where they put
our PTM up against not to his finest thermal paste their nth2 and thermal
Grizzly conduct a knot and if the conventional wisdom holds true that pads
do not perform as well as pastes and certainly not as well as liquid metal
then it should lose to both of these pretty handily and it does until it
doesn't look at this for the first five minutes PCM 7950
totally sucks like you might as well put cheese whiz on your GPU but then the
magic happens you can see it it starts to change from solid to liquid and five
minutes later it's on par with the nth2 then five minutes after that it pulls
ahead we tried it on a desktop CPU as well and
while we couldn't show any difference in temperature thanks to Intel's 80 degree
Target we did see a measurable increase
in power draw as the pad liquefied which
allowed our chip to maintain its turbo speeds ever so slightly more
consistently now to be clear all of
these are very high performance solutions and the difference between the
best and the worst of them is so small that unless you're chasing every
possible Edge you'd probably consider it to be a tie but
that alone is very impressive and it
comes without the risk of getting liquid metal all over your stuff which can kill
it and guess what it gets even better take a look at the industries that are
using this product laptops graphics cards sure but also lighting and
Automotive all of which have one thing in common very long service intervals
that means that even if you don't care about a degree or two of extra
performance the real win here is that you won't need to replace this pad for
the entire life of your device and we're pretty confident about that one good
thing about products that are designed for highly regulated Industries is that
you can expect extremely detailed manufacturer test reports and the one
that Honeywell provides for PTM 7950 is
a doozy of interest to us in particular
is the temperature cycling test which alternates between negative 55 and 125
degrees Celsius 1000 and times PTM 7950
not only passes this test easily but actually manages to improve its thermal
impedance after those 1000 Cycles
compared to when it was new that's probably why Lenovo started
pre-applying this stuff to their Legion 7 laptops in the last year or so to our
knowledge they were the first to use this product in a personal Computing
device but given how secretive the industry tends to be about material
sourcing it actually wouldn't surprise me if other vendors have been quietly
using it for years the earliest data sheet we found from Honeywell
referencing PTM 7950 is actually from all the way back in 2016 which is great
but there are a couple of loose ends that we haven't tied up yet starting
with how the devil you're supposed to get it well remember how I had two different
versions of the pad well all the results we've shown are
from the better one of the two which we believe is the authentic Honeywell
version the thing is unless you want to actually
order a thousand of these your only choice is to buy it from someone who did
order a thousand of them with the markup that comes along with it and most of the
ones that we found are from Rando third-party Marketplace sellers our
slightly worse one came from AliExpress while our slightly better one came from
E by seven but your mileage may vary and
if you guess wrong it might be a pretty tough pill to swallow because problem
number the second PTM 7950 is not cheap
a single eight centimeter by eight centimeter pad like this one that might
get you what a handful of applications cost the same as a whole tube of nth2 or
cost as much as three tubes if you want to take the safe route and go for a
definitely authentic one from Mod DIY finally I mean it's not like we
reinvented the wheel here if you're after the ultimate in thermal performance liquid metal is still the
way to go even if it's only by a hair but if you want something that you can
apply once and have almost Peak tier
thermal results for the entire life of your device well maybe it's time for a phase
changing material like PTM and maybe it's time to end this video with a
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check it out I really think the science behind this material is fascinating I hope you did
too if you like these kinds of weird thermal solutions that come from other
Industries maybe check out the time we lowered temperatures by smearing paste
all over our laptop and a GPU that stuff was very messy good but very
messy