most thermal compounds have a thermal conductivity of about 10 to 20 watts per
meter kelvin with really good ones reaching 30 or so the king of all
thermal compounds liquid metal manages a whopping 73 watts
per meter kelvin but while browsing
newark an industrial supplier we found
this the panasonic pyrolytic graphene
sheet or pgs with an incredible thermal
conductivity of 1950 watts per meter kelvin
but wait that would make this thermal pad 20
times as conductive as liquid metal
is that even possible can i do a 360 during this sponsor segue
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before we get started i need to show you this because it's just absolutely
amazing okay just getting a little r r
and thinking about how my circuit board over here can handle all this heat in
fairness though pyrolytic graphite really is a super cool substance much
cooler than that video it's man-made and cannot be found in
nature and while the actual process of fabricating pyrolytic graphite is a bit
over our heads it sounds pretty sweet basically you take a hydrocarbon like
methane and put it under a vacuum of about 1 torr or about 1 760 of
atmospheric pressure then you heat up the methane to 2000
degrees celsius and slowly about a
thousandth of an inch per hour a layer of graphite grows this creates perfect
hexagonal carbon sheets that lie on top of one another what are they going to
think of next right the shape of the carbon crystals also
makes pyrolytic graphite the most diamagnetic material by weight meaning
that it's repelled by a magnetic field and can be levitated
unfortunately we don't have a magnet big enough to try it and we'd probably want
a slightly thicker sheet of graphite but look here's a cool video of someone else
doing it go check it out at the link below this also makes it excellent for
electromagnetic shielding for use in things like radio towers and satellites
of course we're not here for the magnetic
properties you haven't even opened this have you no you have no idea if it's going to work not at all we want to look
at its thermal properties the most thermally conductive substance in the
world is a diamond with a thermal conductivity of around 2200 watts per
meter kelvin so we're getting very close here to the limits of thermal
conductivity with that insane value of 1950 watts per meter kelvin
apparently the thermal conductivity of this stuff is so great that you can use
a sheet of it to slice through an ice cube using just the heat of your hand
it's this thin with an adhesive so it's
a 10 micrometer of graphite and i think
six micrometers of adhesive so how do i get this adhesive off like i can't even
get a fingernail in there can you see it going in what if we add more heat
holy crap it's actually like going faster
i can tell like easily i don't know if i have the patience for
the whole thing but it definitely sliced into it check this out and you can
actually tell it's sliced in more on the
side that doesn't have the adhesive on it we really need to figure out how to remove that what if we scraped off a
corner of the graphite yeah there you can see the plastic sheet there okay i
think i've got it peeled there we go oh my goodness it's so thin i think we're
good i think i think i got it apart so this insane thermal conductivity means
that pyrolytic graphite is used in you know blow stakes applications like the
nose cones of missiles rocket motors nuclear reactors and even heart valves
of all things but of course this is Linus tech tips we want to know
if it's good for cooling computers curiously one of the main selling points
of pgs is its use in electronics but it
seems like the marketing focuses on thicker less thermally conductive versions
rather than the thinner much more thermally conductive kind that i'm
holding this one is just 10 micrometers
thick also curiously it seems that for the thicker thermal pads that panasonic
makes they've basically glued together a bunch of thin thermal pads with a
thermally conductive glue now compared to other thermal pads these offer
excellent performance but neither of those are going to cut it if we want to
get the most performance ah there it is out of our CPU here before we test this
out though we need a baseline
now we already pre-ran using Noctua's nth2 but there's already a graphite
thermal pad on the market for computers this is the innovation cooling graphite
thermal pad and we looked at it a couple of years ago it doesn't keep up with a
high quality thermal paste but it's good enough it's reusable it creates no
mess it lasts basically forever and it can withstand temperatures that your
processor will never see we actually really like this especially for test benches
one problem with the ic graphite thermal pad though is that it is electrically
conductive apparently that is not the case with pgs
my script just says from here things get loose and probably weird
that sounds about right that is not a lot of resistance two ohms
yeah something like that okay let's try this okay that's about the
same with that out of the way frankly i have no idea what to expect now because
already the spec sheet doesn't seem to be entirely
forthcoming with real information about the product
and there's got to be a reason that people aren't using this stuff i
have concerns about the thickness yeah that's my concern as well like even just
micro imperfections in the bottom of the heatsink or CPU seem like this isn't
going to bridge the gap yeah and there's stuff like i think Noctua's thermal compounds not as
thermally conductive as a lot of other ones but it works better because it's just
better at spreading out and filling in those gaps it's also like think about
how sick it would be to be able to just install one of these on the bottom of a cooler and just never worry about it
again yeah wait we don't know what the thermal
conductivity of that adhesive is though um it's quite high oh okay there's our
innovation cooling pad now we can throw our nhd14 on here
d15 is this a d15 yep well there you go
it has your name on the box and you don't even know what it is
i'm more of a single tower cooler guy what the dualies are the best yeah i
know but they're so unwieldy that's like part of the appeal though
our test bench is a core i9 10 900 k
and we're running the blender classroom test which is going to take us yeah
about six or seven minutes giving us a good idea of where it's going to top out
yeah for the nth2 our average temperature was 86.4 degrees and the max
was 90. so that's we're going to be i found this by just sorting most
thermally conductive on the website
and i was like wow that's really really terribly conductive
expected that's a little worse
so i'm doing some rough in head math and
i'm going to say 93 and a half 93 not bad yes uh that's
worse but it didn't thermal throttle and that's all we really need because that means we know the thermal output through
the duration of the test was the same so we can shut it down now
and take a crack at this i brought over a dowel pin so that we can try and smooth
it out sure it's actually probably not a terrible idea i mean this whole thing is
kind of not really a great idea but like should we adhere to the heatsink or to
the CPU i kind of liked your idea of doing it to the heatsink yeah cause that
would be so awesome to be able to just poop plunk a heatsink yeah okay once it
sticks on there it's pretty sticky so that's good for us to know about uh
right about now oh lordy okay
so here's the plan
hmm
like i was just here's the plan and then nothing
there is no plan that's what i'm trying to say alex
good job Linus it looks like there's some like junk under there though
doesn't it you know what forget it no no no no i'm out i'm out try again
oh that's way better i'm glad we didn't even bother to test the other
application if we discovered a fantastic and affordable new thermal interface
material you can bet you'll find it soon on ltteststore.com marked up of course
well the stuff is only like seven dollars and fifty cents for a
sheet of it like that size wait
we spent 40 dollars on this little pack
if our idol temps are anything to go by
this may actually work of course idol temps tell us
really not much with the story we're also like just on the cusp of thermal
throttling which is kind of unfortunate but
well that's fine because if it doesn't perform as well as the ic
pad then it doesn't it's irrelevant so i don't think it's gonna work
not as well as this pitch for ltteststore.com anyway all right
i want it to work because i want to be like oh we found a thing that's so cool
but i my my hope level is quite low
and we're done bud oh no
and it's terrible oh oh we dropped like
400 megahertz off our CPU what if we put another layer
on the CPU to try to
you know curiously the contact patch actually
isn't even that bad it does only contact this area here but
that's basically the die so that's about that matters it's about half of the die
the die on the 10 900k is pretty big under there you know what i want to try
it i want to put another layer on the CPU okay screw it how did you do this
last time good luck everybody oh oh hi hey oh yeah
got a fan going over there
uh that's that's not great i kind of took out one of the
things here if it doesn't do worse i guess i can accept that as sort of a
small victory f12 to
what pay respect okay okay
so it's not great for this application
but that's fine because nobody advertised it as being great for this
application one of the other things it is apparently good for is heat transport
so you might think okay well hey Linus okay it's not that great for
moving heat from the CPU up to the heat sink but what if it could spread it out
a lot well the problem is that it's not nearly as
good as a heat pipe those can get up to a hundred thousand watts per meter
kelvin because they aren't relying on just conduction instead they're using
convection and phase change cooling together to move the heat around like
real quick styles some random other use cases for this
stuff include apparently phones heated steering wheels which i thought
was pretty cool that that would be a really neat way to kind of move the heat
around from the element to spread it out more evenly heated seats again to spread
heat out more evenly servers very vague but apparently they're good
for servers and radio antennas which we mentioned
before as for using it to cool your computer
well not unless you want to run at you know 98 degrees because you just
missed the 90s that much
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at the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this video and crazy
cooling projects why don't i why don't we throw to the five gigahertz laptop
sure yeah check that all the time yeah check out the crazy uh the crazy
cooling the laptop with the blowy matron server fan got it to five gigahertz that
alex and i did ages ago you know we could also throw people to
another thing that didn't work like when we harvested the thermal interface
material from between until no let's throw them to like the macbook
video how about all three