Gadgetory

thermal paste is one of those finicky subjects for a lot of people and for a number of reasons we deal with it Aztec two-person virtually every time we show the application process what's the best method for applying what's the best compound for said application did you use too much of the compound too little everyone has an opinion and even after independent validation and revalidation by members of the tech community it always seems like someone somewhere else emerges with different results and that just adds to the mass hysteria so in this video we're gonna answer a very simple question with perhaps one of the most rudimentary testing techniques we've ever done on the channel this is thermal Grizzly's carbonate thermal Pat infused with carbon tubes designed to transfer heat efficiently and effectively from the heat source to the heat sink thermal grizzly claims mid-range thermal paste performance so we'll be sure to put that to the test now the company also boasts over the pads ability to be reused and left in systems for indefinite amounts of time without risk of composition breakdown or expansion both of which tend to eat into the performance of typical say mx4 paste so it seems promising it might be no no a little too good to be true so what you're looking at here is the pad and this is it like it honestly feels like a little microfiber cleaning cloth although it's probably a bit rougher than that it's just it's extremely thin and flexible in fact the thinner the better in this case roman spoke of a bit of it at CES this year and emphasized the companies plan to get this sheet as thin as possible you can see it's already pretty thin but it could be thinner and that would be good from a conductivity standpoint you see on paper this thing has a conductivity rating of 60 2.5 watts per meter Kelvin obviously the higher that conductivity rating is it means it can pull more energy from said surface at a given temperature that brings this awfully close to something like conduct a night which is thermal Grizzly's liquid metal solution it's a great compound if you're in 2d living or you know optimal performance it's a bit messy it's kind of hard to keep up with you can check out more of that in this video right here but if you're worried about something that lasts a long time and really can be moved from system to system it's not dirty at all it's actually a very clean application process then this might be for you we're gonna find out though what exactly makes this special so this point you might be thinking this is the holy grail of thermal solutions this little flappy thing right here it's flexible long-lasting highly conductive both electrically and thermally so don't put this over anything electrically conductive however back to the thickness of the sheet while thermal conductivity is extremely high in this market space carbonate pads are still quite thick by comparison consider this when you apply thermal paste and smoosh a cooler atop CPU that paste is spread extremely thin there's a lot of tension there heat much prefers metal over paste as a medium meaning a bottleneck and almost any system is in fact the thermal compound which is why some direct die solutions exist to eliminate one point of an efficiency between the IHS and the die but anyway real quick back to the connectivity of this and the thickness if you have something that's extremely conductive thermally conductive like this sixty two point five is really high but its thickness is gonna counteract that just a bit we end up with kind of a happy medium that's what we have here now shoroma and this team could have made this thinner this pad could have been half as thick as it is now and it's very difficult you can imagine to slice something even thinner than this so it would perform better but the pad might last as long at which point why would you use this over something else that you know is tried and true so that's when they came back to the whole long-lasting approach you want this thing to last a lifetime theoretically this should never break down I mean its carbon you know try melting carbon let me know how that goes so yeah theoretically you could plot these things into run-of-the-mill systems like I would say like school computers this would be a great application for and you can let them run in there for decades you've never have to worry about replacing them whereas in the case of thermal paste like this as a solution breaks down with time the interface becomes less efficient and the CPU in question runs hotter that's why systems tend to run hotter over time this is usually the first sign that something's going wrong so carbon up pads are made to be reusable they're made to last a long time and that I think is the biggest selling point of this material in fact I think I'm gonna start using these from now on because this saves me the time of having to clean up the thermal paste and reapply I mean this can be a very consistent approach right so if I want to test coolers like if I want to switch between one and another there's different ways to apply thermal paste maybe I put a little more at one point than another you don't want those small variations and using something like this would be a lot better because it keeps things rather standardized so from my perspective this is a great just kind of way to keep things constant at least when it comes to the thermal interface between the IIHS and the cooler that's just my take but for just in pcs in general if you're just looking for a solid solution I think this is gonna be it now that said we got numbers to talk about and we're gonna see just how well this performs to some stock thermal compound I'm just calling the stock because it's not special by any means and x4 is decent pace but it's not gonna perform as good as cryo not which will cost obviously a bit more as well we're gonna see how this fares see if thermo because these claims hold true that this indeed does perform about as well as your run-of-the-mill thermal compound now our tests can't possibly speak to the longevity of the pad though the principles make sense we decided in this video to test just the temperature claims made by thermal grizzly roaming claims low to mid range then we'll pace performance as I just said when it comes to thermals so in my eyes it made sense to compare the pads to stock thermal compounds found underneath box coolers like the AMD Wraith cooler they're a spire even the Wraith stealth as well as common solutions like the arc AMX flood and flashing here and there you'll also find thermal grisly stone cryo solution which is also right in front of me and this is more or less a high-performing thermal paste and it won't cure with times that's really the selling point here is it's not gonna get all crusty and whatnot the composition of it is actually highly intriguing I'd like to know a little more about what they use to prevent it from curing but maybe that's a trade secret now the software I use to pull these numbers was I 264 engineer stressed aspects included the CPU FPU cache and memory which while external is still an important and heavily utilized aspect of any modern chips that's why I included memory stressing the CPU used was the Rison 520 600 X which I feel is indicative of a growing number of gamers and streamers on the market AMD's perspective and performance in the CPU space has been spectacular lately and it always feels to me like Intel gets all the love when it comes to testing components and cooling solutions so yeah here's one for AMD there is however just one catch to all of this and it has to do with the carbon on pads I must confess I didn't know this going into it I thought the pad would be a little bigger and we'd have to cut it down to size but thermal Bursley plans to sell different sized pads depending on your application so in this case I have a 32 by 32 millimeter pad basically the size of an Intel desktop IHS something like the 8700 K or 6400 if you want to go back to few generations the recommended size for rise and CPUs though is 38 by 38 which them obviously sells as a separate SKU however all I had in hand were Intel samples so yeah as you can see here corners of the rise in heat spreader aren't being covered you technically want to cover all of this for optimal performance so our car were not pad ran at a slight disadvantage that's just want you to keep that in mind like it's it's not performing as good as it could maybe a 1 or 2 degree Delta the what you're gonna see on screen but still I think you'll be impressed by this so our rise in 520 600 X was overclocked across all 6 cores to 4 gigahertz with a 100 millivolt offset from stock the BIOS fan curve was set to max rpm to eliminate potential compensation when temps reached certain levels this way all scenarios experienced the same level essentially of cooling throughout the Vernon's so despite our setback regarding IHS coverage with Pad solution we actually ended up with nearly identical peak core temperatures in the case of the pad and Arctic MX or thermal paste 88 degrees Celsius verse 87 this could be chalked up to you know application variation or even slight differences as a diode level which measures temperatures directly in the diets the method we were using in nighted 64 I double and triple-checked mx4 coverage when removing the cooler between runs by the way to make sure there was nothing inherently wrong with the way I was applying thermal paste there's always somebody complaining about the application I just do one long line from top to bottom and it tends to spread rather evenly you can also see how stock AMD paste fared quite well by comparison only a single degree hotter than the pad and two degrees hotter than mx4 lastly the cryo solution which thermal grizzly claims is an excellent paste for overclockers and enthusiast in general performs only slightly better than MX for at 85 degrees and while I expected a slightly wider margin it should be noted that this first off doesn't cure which is good and it should also be noted that we're using the stock cooler here and and while for digger's doesn't seem like a super stellar overclock by any means our CPU in particular was decently stubborn when it came to voltage so I imagine as things get hotter and the coolers TDP is exceeded I mean this is a 95 watt cooler with a 95 watt chips so it's on the brink already a new weak link is exposed and the temperature gaps tend to close which is what we saw here but back to carbonate am i impressed yeah absolutely the idea that you know like a thin sheet of what's essentially carbon and that's what this is can cool an overclocked CPU is still a bit mind-blowing to me I've never worked with any thermal pad like this apart from the ones that you would use to cool the RMS and you know vram modules and whatnot but I've never used something like this over a CPU and this still just seems so like pseudoscience to me I still don't understand exactly how it works I mean I understand in principle but just thinking about the fact that this is between my CPU cooler and my CPU it just kind of scares me a little bit still even though I've seen the numbers I've seen how effective this is it just seems so weird I shouldn't have been applying paste for years but back to the application I feel like that's the the selling point of this right here the ease of use you literally have to just lay this on top of the IHS like you're tucking in your cpu from bedtime right sandwich the cooler and you're good to go like it's mess free its reusable its long-lasting and comparable in performance to some popular thermal solutions like Amex for I love this stuff so much they actually intend to use only carbon on the future for at least my in-house testing as long as it's all consistent and constant I'm fine with that it makes switching coolers super easy and clean in my case I can build and rebuild systems and simply reuse this thing right here this floppy little piece of carbon it won't cost much more than typical compounds it won't break down over time you can in theory use this thing over and over again I mean that in and of itself is pretty incredible it's a worthy investment in my book and another option for those more concerned with peace of mind than extreme performance you guys liked this video or maybe just liked the product let me know by giving us one of thumbs up I do appreciate I think Roman and me therm grizzly team did a great job with this and we should see it on sale pretty soon actually think you can buy it in a few places already I will link those places down below along with the other stuff we've tested here you can buy em x4 and Amazon a new wagon pretty sure as well as cryo not solution so keep your eyes out for all of those and just a quick note too on the variations I'm sure you'll see other people or you've already seen other people test these other solutions you're gonna get different temperatures it's gonna depend on the system being used on the cooler being used the overclocks bio settings it's all going to change just a little bit so don't hold my numbers perfectly true all the time the one thing I did want to do is make sure that this room was at a constant ambient temperature all the time so that from you know solution to solution that there's not a big temperature Delta we want everything as consistent as possible obviously to narrow down only the variables that we really care about and in this case it was just thermal compounds thumbs up again if you liked the video thumbs down for the obstacle guy red subscribe but if you haven't already stay tuned for more content like this and I was gonna say something else totally forgot was gonna oh yea become a member if you want to be want to be super fancy become a member it's like five bucks a month eeeh special emojis and stuff anyway I'll let you go you guys have been awesome this is science video thanks for watching thanks for learning with them