Recently heard about Thermal pads instead of paste, had never crossed my mind this could be a thing. Very curious to how good these actually are and if they perform any better? Also what does their lifetime look like? If anyone here has any experience with these please let me know 🌻
Most thermal pads aren’t really suitable for something high power like a CPU or GPU. But the phase change thermal pads are incredible.
I installed some of the Honeywell PTM 7950 on my laptop and it’s like magic. It’s 99.9% a good as Liquid Metal, but you don’t have the dry out problems. In theory it should never dry out actually unlike the thermal paste I had in my laptop which was toast in less than 6 months.
Some of these are not the pads you’re thinking of. Carbonaut and Kryosheet are definitely made for high power devices.
Generally they’re for uneven surfaces like multiple chips on a PCB (RAM, SSDs, etc.) or where there’s a gap between the chip and the heatsink (e.g. something using the chassis as a heatsink).
There’s also thermal epoxy, which glues the heatsink to the chip, like with smaller cards that don’t expect to have the heatsink removed.
For a CPU or GPU, paste is still better.
