4 ms·
Thermal pads are way thicker and typically higher resistance - even good and thin ones are worse than standard paste and basically useless over a dozen watts (d
by labawi 5y ago
Thermal pads are way thicker and typically higher resistance - even good and thin ones are worse than standard paste and basically useless over a dozen watts (depending on surface area * temperature difference).
OTOH, used properly, liquid (liquefying) metal should have a better transfer efficiency than paste.
If you have issues, you can also try lapping the surfaces.
- bayindirh 5y agoThe sinks I use have 3M integrated pads. They might not be the highest performing ones, but they're pretty decent for their size. As I've said, it's attached to a OrangePi Zero which has a very small, epoxy packaged CPU. So tension-mounting, lapping, or using higher end compounds are out of question. The whole point of OrangePi Zero is being small all over, so it's happy temp-wise with its normal load, I'm not planning to work on it further for now. Raspberry Pi 4 is different and has a whole-body heatsink, and its paste is good for now. If it starts to lose cooling capacity, that'll be a different matter all-over.