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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