Once every few weeks we hear about new thermal paste from one manufacturer or another, but it rarely happens that we receive an announcement on thermal pads. Today that happened, when Arctic announced its new thermal pad, which is simply named "Arctic Thermal Pad." Creative eh?
The thermal pads come in large squares, and the idea is that you cut them up yourself to the desired size. After that, you place the cutouts over the part that needs cooling and top that off with a heatsink of some sort.
Of course, it needn't be said that you shouldn't use these between high heat output devices, such as a GPU, but rather on memory, VRM circuitry, and such. They may, however, work on low-power CPUs in situations where high thermal conductivity isn't required.
Another use of the pads is by leaving them in large sheets and covering an entire PCB, such as the backside of a graphics card, although we're not sure what the performance benefit would be.
Either way, Arctic mentioned that the thermal pads have a thermal conductivity of 6.0 W/mK, which is actually quite good, even competing with some cheaper thermal pastes. Of course, it remains to be seen how they would compare in practice. Arctic did test its Thermal Pad against pads from three of its competitors.
The Arctic Thermal Pads will be available in two sizes, 50 x 50 mm and 145 x 145 mm, with thicknesses of 0.5 mm, 1.0 mm and 1.5 mm, depending on what you need. You can obtain them immediately through Amazon, or directly from Arctic.
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Insulating the backside has some benefit.
Hmm, new Tom's article topic perhaps? :D
Almost all of those things have the tab connected to something so isolation with good thermal performance with an attached heat sink is always helpful.
Will be interested to see what these go for.
AI Technology has some 'pads' that are much thinner at 3 mils and are 1.5" x 1.5"
Their Blurb on the 'Cool Silver Pad"
"COOL-SILVER PAD™ Thermal Pad has a measurable performance advantage in dropping the semiconductor junction temperature with the same heat-sink and CPU. It contains more than 90% silver by weight, 0% silicone, and is RoHS compliant. The thermal resistance is lower than the known “industry standard” of <0.0045°C-in2/Watt @ 0.001 inch interface layer thickness. Side by side comparison with the best known thermal interface materials for CPU applications demonstrated the superior performance of COOL-SILVER PAD™."
Non Conductive Too.
"COOL-SILVER PAD™ TIM, unlike some of the earlier generations of silver thermal interface materials, will not separate, run, migrate, or bleed. Even though the thermal conductivity comes from the highly packed micronized pure silver particulate, it is not electrically conductive."
They also have larger pads and thicker gap filler pads.
Here's the link
http://www.aitechnology.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3
I'm confused. How exactly do you put a motherboard into a case like this? Or any case really?
They use a backside heatsink on some of the video card coolers they make so this make sense.