Graphite Thermal Pad vs grease?

[zombie67]

Has anyone personally tried this out? It seems like it would be longer lasting, and perhaps more importantly, removes the guesswork when applying grease. I know we were using them with Sparc chips back when I was still working for oracle.

They raised the question about covering a larger CPU. It comes in 30x30 and 40x40. I know the actual CPU is usually much smaller than the cover. But I am not sure of the size of a threadripper CPU?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpphKzmDiJM

[John P. Myers]

The 3970X can put out nearly 300W of heat under max loads without overclocking. I don't know of any pad that could handle that. It's 58.5 x 75.4 though if you want to try.

A good grease pattern for the TR is to make an X in the middle of the chip with each line being about 2 inches long. Then put 1 pea-sized dot in each of the 4 open areas created by the X shape

[zombie67]

https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/299-carbonaut-en

They have one for the 1st/2nd gen threadripper: "51 x 68 AMD Threadripper CPUs e.g. 1950X, 1920X, 2990WX". Maybe that is good enough to cover the actual chip?

My problem with grease is that I over-apply, just because there is no way to be sure what the right amount is. Then, when I remove a heatsink for whatever reason, it is clear I put too much on from all the over-flow around the edges. I do it so rarely, I never get good at it.

Assuming I stick with grease, is Arctic Silver 5 still the best? Last time I checked was something like 15 years ago. I still see it mentioned.

Edit: Man, there are a LOT of videos on YouTube about thermal grease. And everyone seems to have different opinions on how to apply it. Yikes. Anyway, I bought some Noctua NT-H1.

[pinhodecarlos]

The thickness of the grease is in function of how much you want to dissipate of thermal heat vs cost, this is purely a heat and mass optimization transfer problem. Also not sure if a CPU can be consider as a fin. I bet there are some academic papers on this subject....