The LAST Thermal Paste you'll ever need??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,684 words · ~8 min read
0:00
feels like every time i come in this room it's some crazy cooling experiment
0:06
usually with you the air con is good in here
0:09
which is
0:13
and that actually probably makes sense because this room isn't big enough for
0:16
us to actually hold meetings in here anymore and because we're at it yet again this right
0:21
here is a bizarre cooling product this is the
0:26
ic graphite thermal pad
0:30
the last thermal interface you will ever need
0:34
they claim that this thermal pad
0:37
performs as well as thermal paste
0:40
it is extremely durable so it could last for decades
0:44
and it's reusable
0:48
let's investigate shall we
0:52
after i tell you about private internet access pia is the vpn service that
0:57
encrypts all of your internet traffic and uses a safe protected ip and it's
1:01
got lots of other useful features as well you can check it out at the link
1:04
below
1:19
ow
1:22
well it conducts heat yeah really well especially in the x y
1:28
all right so what the hell is this thing
1:31
so that's totally graphite um which i guess is carbon
1:35
i don't know exactly what to say for the what exactly is this i have notes um
1:41
this is the innovation cooling graphite thermal pad
1:45
the goal of it is to replace traditional thermal pastes in long-term applications
1:50
its main advantages are its easy application there's no guessing how much
1:55
to put on it's extremely long life and
1:58
it's high resistance to thermal changes which make it also good for extreme
2:03
cooling scenarios where liquid metal or normal thermal paste might freeze
2:09
so in a nutshell what they're saying is that this pad
2:12
even though it will be so thick compared to a paste has no real disadvantage
2:17
compared to spreading goop on your CPU
2:21
well one disadvantage is that it
2:24
is electrically conductive so
2:27
one yeah like two ohms
2:30
which is like better than a wire but if you just toss it on your motherboard
2:35
it's going to fry it so
2:38
okay so you do have to be more careful but unlike liquid metal it's not going
2:43
to seep out yeah it's not going to just go everywhere you can
2:46
get it pretty on there so would you just cut it to size if you had something that
2:50
was yeah so the main spec on this is its thermal conductivity 35 watts per meter
2:55
kelvin but i think probably most people wouldn't have a ton of context for what
3:00
that means so compared to like ic diamond that's
3:04
really high so this is like four and a half watts per meter kelvin so it should
3:07
be able to conduct a lot of heat through it
3:12
but what is a watt per meter kelvin
3:17
you don't know exactly do you no why do i even employ these people i'm looking
3:20
it up right now unfortunately there are differing definitions for these terms
3:25
okay so quantity of heat that passes in a unit time through a plate of
3:29
particular area or thickness when opposite faces different
3:33
temperature by one kelvin
3:36
so that means that if there's one kelvin difference between the two
3:40
you can conduct 35 watts per meter so it
3:43
actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it like that cool let's try it
3:49
this is trippy man like
3:54
cleaning all of the paste off
3:57
and having it just like dry mounted
4:01
like there are things in life that feel natural to mount dry
4:05
and there are things and there are things that don't
4:10
uh so an advantage to this dry approach
4:14
is that there's no liquid
4:18
like you know most thermal compounds are some kind of a suspension of some sort
4:22
so there's no liquid to eventually evaporate or dry out or mush out or
4:28
anything like that it's just that's just it you just plunk it on there this is
4:32
crazy just for the sake of you know transparency
4:37
no thermal paste double screw on the driver oh you
4:41
finished first now i feel awkward
4:47
okay it's trippy like it seems like it it's
4:52
not right you know so we're looking at this is a 7980xe
4:56
with liquid metal in it okay so we're looking at an average
5:00
temperature across all cores of 50.56
5:03
and that was with ic diamond yeah so i see diamond might not be the highest
5:07
performance thermal compound but it's very respectable they're all within what
5:11
like two degrees of each other at the high end yeah i mean we had that bulk stuff that
5:16
didn't perform particularly well that video is worth watching you can check
5:20
that out here well nothing's immediately concerning nope that looks very
5:25
impressive yeah what did we get on icy diamond
5:30
max 58 average 50.56
5:34
like it should perform in everything that i've read
5:37
one to two degrees worse but
5:42
i mean that's part of the argument for a solution like this
5:46
that there's no room for user error
5:49
yeah like i might have done a bad core application or a bad mount so at the end
5:53
of the day that's the conclusion of this video alex is a bad man
6:03
we won't know for another uh 20 minutes or so
6:07
or maybe five minutes i don't know
6:10
all right so it's been
6:14
hours yeah yeah okay cool how do we do
6:18
plus 50 plus what's the point of even having a fancy
6:22
ass calculator if it doesn't get it right well it's not the calculator's fault
6:27
so it's the user heatsink's barely warm which i guess
6:32
makes sense it still trips me out so this one from
6:37
alex's pre-testing has actually been used a couple times
6:41
and innovation cooling told us that they've had people beta testing these
6:45
that have reused them like over 20 times
6:49
over 50 even over 50 yeah over 50. all
6:53
right so our average is 51.7
6:56
so exactly what we expected okay so all
7:01
that's left for me then is
7:04
i want to i want to see like is it thinner yeah like i don't know like
7:10
let's shut it down all right oh one thing that is cool about it is
7:14
that it has um the 35 watts per meter
7:17
kelvin that's in the z direction so like up and down
7:20
but it's 800 ish 800 000 they're not totally sure
7:25
what's per meter calvin from side to side oh so that's why it burned me when
7:29
i torched it yeah so that's really good if you have like a hot spot on your CPU
7:33
it'll get it out to the heat pipes really well
7:36
one thing i don't like about it that much is the size
7:42
why well
7:45
i mean that looks fine for a core i9 but if i was cooling something like a
7:49
threadripper or one of Intel xeon scalables or something like that like a
7:53
really big chip i
7:57
kind of feel like you could actually have die area
8:02
can you just use potentially not covered i i don't know it's a wonderful question
8:06
i don't know the answer to that so it should be like that in
8:10
theoretically nothing would ever happen to it at all yeah they said lifetime
8:16
it should be about the same i think the coolest thing about this for
8:19
me is like you know for the last 10 20 years you know every other month there's
8:24
like a big article about how you know
8:27
carbon nanotubes or this other novel implementation of carbon is going to
8:32
completely revolutionize everything and up until now at least in the thermal
8:36
space although theoretically it has great thermal properties we haven't
8:40
really seen anything and now here it is you can buy it you
8:43
can stick it in your computer yeah completely commercial
8:47
and it works
8:51
speaking of things that work our sponsor for this video freshbooks is
8:55
the small business accounting solution built for the way you want to work it's
9:00
designed for freelancers and small business owners and allows them to save
9:04
time get more organized and perhaps most importantly get paid faster freshbooks
9:09
lets you create and send professional looking invoices in a matter of seconds
9:13
lets you set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up
9:17
to four days faster it lets you see when your client has seen your invoice
9:21
putting an end once and for all to the guessing games and they've got fantastic
9:25
customer service you call freshbooks you talk to a real person and they will help
9:29
you out so to try freshbooks for 30 days for free just head to the link in the
9:34
video description that's freshbooks.com tech tips and then enter Linus tech tips
9:39
in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if you
9:43
disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out
9:46
where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description that is if there's any left after
9:51
the like two master cartons that they sent to us also linked in the video
9:55
description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our
9:59
community for ooh i'm sorry and our community forum which you should totally
10:03
join so like theoretically there's no reason
10:06
for us to ever apply thermal goop again we just throw
10:09
these on everything from now on and just reuse them forever like i guess we could
10:15
yeah take that thermal paste
10:19
no no it's like
10:23
you've got so much of it though