Thermal conductive pads are useful wherever a thermal paste cannot be reasonably applied. A good example are power supply circuit of graphics cards and processors, so the choice of test subjects was unambiguous. It was less clear, however, what thickness of pads is most effective, if it is better to pay for more expensive ones, and what improvement to expect.
Gallery of thermal images
These pictures illustrate the heat of the heatsink. The higher the contrast of the coils, the lower the heat transfer through the pad. The weakest one was measured when using Arctic 0.5 mm, the best with the Thermal Grizzly pad.
Great test, well done!
Thanks for share!
Thank you for such quality review!
Infrared thermometers are useless for temperature testing. You guys should study what GamersNexus is doing on Youtube and beef up your testing criteria significantly.
Thank you for your comment. Don’t take offence, but we don’t consider the mentioned source to be relevant, on the contrary it is misleading tabloid. Wasn’t it GN who used a thermal imaging camera to spread demagoguery about melting 12VHPWR connectors and used IR imaging for that (but with inappropriately set emissivity number for the material of the critical point/metal hollows)?
If you have studied this, we would be glad if you could give us a technical lesson on why IR sensing is useless for temperature analysis. 🙂
GamersNexus lol. GamersNexus is a silly entertainment channel where the tech dude bro guy throws Nvidia GPU’s in the trash to please AMD cultist viewers. It has long sacrificed it’s tech pro nature at the altar of clickbait cheap entertainment for zoomer kids.