This Sounds Too Good to be True - 1950W/(m*K) TIM

[AlexTheGreatish]

The Panasonic Pyrolytic Graphite Sheet (PGS) has a staggering thermal conductivity of 1950W/(m*K) - but is it as good as the spec sheet says?

 

Buy Pyrolytic Panasonic Graphene Sheet: https://www.digikey.ca/en/product-highlight/p/panasonic/pyrolytic-graphite-sheets

 

Buy Noctua NT-H2

On Amazon (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/lPUo

On Newegg (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/UBDIyC

 

Buy Thermal Pads

On Amazon (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/I4wYuJ

On Newegg (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/ugKwas

 

*Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.*

 

 

 

[Windows7ge]

Aught to see if they can get a sponsor though Mouser Electronics. They also have graphite thermal pads that perform ~ the same as IC Graphite but you get a lot more for a lot less.

 

They've done a great job in my servers and keeping a O.C.ed 5960X <80°C.

[figgyc]

https://industrial.panasonic.com/cdbs/www-data/pdf/AYA0000/AYA0000C27.pdf

Was looking through the link in the description and found this, the reason it doesn't work is because they are designed to conduct heat perpendicular to the pad (the "a-b plane") and not the c plane which would be up from the CPU to the heatsink.

[BigSur]

The camera focus was pretty bad. Many a time Linus was going off focus and Alex once (pretty horribly). And just to let you know, the ting ad bar in the end displayed Samsung Galaxy 10+. Otherwise the video was very interesting. 

[Enderman]

???

Where the hell did they get those w/mk numbers??

 

Thermal compounds are no where near 30w/mk

Most are below 10w/mk (MX4 and NT-H1 are 8.5) with the best ones like Kryonaut being 12w/mk.

 

At least the liquid metal w/mk is correct.

 

 

 

The reason graphene thermal pads suck is because they are just a thin sheet of a solid, so you're basically just making the heatsink/CPU surface thicker, you're not filling in the irregular gaps between the two like a liquid would.

The entire point of a thermal paste is to fill in irregular spaces because neither the CPU nor heatsink are perfectly flat.

 

If the CPU and heatsink were lapped to near-perfection then yes then graphite pad would work, but then you could simply not use the pad at all and just have the CPU contact the heatsink directly for even less thermal resistance.

[Nystemy]

10µm isn't a lot of thickness to work with, especially considering that the only gaps it can fill is in proportion to how much one can compress it.
So in reality, it might not fill out much gaps at all...

Though, it could be interesting to see it used on heatsink fins themselves. Since neither aluminium nor copper is all that great at carrying heat over a large distance if they are just a thin sheet. But industrial solutions can be rather interesting at times. Though usually a bit "inappropriate" for areas that they weren't developed for. But it were worth a shot.

 

Though, I have been curious to what performance one would get if one properly lapped a CPU and heatsink and then wringed them together as if they are a pair of gauge blocks. (lapping for this to work requires exceptionally small surface variations, and also an exceptional flatness over the surfaces. (hand lapping tends to make things slightly convex.))

[nikontraros]

Here's an idea: why don't you cut a piece, double the area of the last one, then carefully stick half on the CPU and half on the cooler and see the results...

[Hunter259]

Stupid idea but you guys love those. Why not try blending the sheet and mix it with some popular thermal compounds? Already wasted $40 why not have some fun with it lmao

[Neamow]

Watch Linus' neck from 10:23. Linus is an alien!

[ChalkChalkson]

2 hours ago, Enderman said:

The reason graphene thermal pads suck is because they are just a thin sheet of a solid, so you're basically just making the heatsink/CPU surface thicker, you're not filling in the irregular gaps between the two like a liquid would.

Nope there is more to it. If all that was going on was the shitty elasticity, you'd see performance very similar to that of a dry mount (which isn't that awful). The physics of pyrolitic carbon is such that is only conducts in one plane (thread where I explained how and why after the floatplane release). Or as figgyc said:

3 hours ago, figgyc said:

https://industrial.panasonic.com/cdbs/www-data/pdf/AYA0000/AYA0000C27.pdf

Was looking through the link in the description and found this, the reason it doesn't work is because they are designed to conduct heat perpendicular to the pad (the "a-b plane") and not the c plane which would be up from the CPU to the heatsink.

Since it's in the description of the product I'd assume @AlexTheGreatish was aware. Pretty hyped to see what they are planning with it.

 

1 hour ago, Hunter259 said:

Stupid idea but you guys love those. Why not try blending the sheet and mix it with some popular thermal compounds? Already wasted $40 why not have some fun with it lmao

That could work. In the thread I linked earlier we also chatted for a second about thermal compounds that use small fibers of carbon to increase conductivity. Blending would be considerably worse though since it produces flakes. The performance you'd get would essentially be the average of the conductivities in all directions which is to say you put a lot of effort into getting slightly worse graphite. Maybe if you could find a way of getting  ~1-10µm thin strips that are ~100µm long, then suspending them in a silicone rubber of some sort and aligning them to poke up vertically through the use of an electrostatic field....

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Nope there is more to it. If all that was going on was the shitty elasticity, you'd see performance very similar to that of a dry mount (which isn't that awful).

The performance was very similar to that of a dry mount.

Did you not watch the video??

 

And yes I know it has directional thermal conductivity.

 

 

[ChalkChalkson]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

The performance was very similar to that of a dry mount.

Did you not watch the video??

huh, dont have much experience with that particular chip, but the temperature seemed high for a dry mount with adequate pressure.

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

[pictures]

This basically just shows that these pads are more a replacement for the IHS than for the thermal pad.

[F60Outrunn]

what is the laptop shown at 7:37 which alex is using? looks pretty good

[Barakar42]

What if you could replace the fins on the cooler with that stuff since it's better at transporting heat or even maybe cover the fins with it to help with the heat dissipation 

 

Would that work any better seeing as the heat pipes are great at transporting heat. The next step would be to get the heat to the fins to be dispersed 

[RejZoR]

Heat spreads horizontally across graphite hexagons structure. And it does that REALLY quickly.

 

To use graphite for such applications like CPU coolers, you'd have to create a single layer of graphite hexagons perpendicular to each other in vertical formation instead of being one next to another in planar formation. That would create insane thermal transfer in direction that we need, plus it would be inherently thicker and potentially fill in gaps in the material better.

 

I'm not aware of anyone making such graphite structure.

[Amaranth]

Interestingly, the IC Graphite pad seems to be a repackaging of Panasonic's EYG-S0918ZLX2 'Soft PGS' that is pre-cut.

[Enderman]

2 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

huh, dont have much experience with that particular chip, but the temperature seemed high for a dry mount with adequate pressure.

This basically just shows that these pads are more a replacement for the IHS than for the thermal pad.

The conductivity in the vertical axis is lik 15W/mk which is still higher than all thermal pastes, but the reason the temps are at 80C+ at idle is because it's basically a solid material and does not improve the contact between the CPU and heatsink at all.

They're just stacks of graphene sheets, that's like extremey hard to compress.

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, Enderman said:

The conductivity in the vertical axis is lik 15W/mk which is still higher than all thermal pastes, but the reason the temps are at 80C+ at idle is because it's basically a solid material and does not improve the contact between the CPU and heatsink at all.

They're just stacks of graphene sheets, that's like extremey hard to compress.

I mean over the thermal paste you often have a relevant temperature drop. Guess it's just that I compare this to "good" metal to metal contact and you compare it to thermal paste.

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

I mean over the thermal paste you often have a relevant temperature drop. Guess it's just that I compare this to "good" metal to metal contact and you compare it to thermal paste.

Well yeah as I said earlier, if you have both surfaces lapped and completely flat you would have really good thermal transfer without thermal paste, and the PGS would be useless then because the surfaces are already flat.

 

The point of thermal paste is filling in gaps in the non-flat surfaces of a CPU and heatsink, which PGS does not do.

[vgamesx1]

I just came here to point out that they bought the wrong thing, they definitely should've tried Soft PGS which IS actually marketed as a thermal interface material. 

Quote

Panasonic’s “Soft PGS” is an ideal Thermal Interface Material (TIM) solution. Soft PGS is designed with high compressibility characteristics to reduce contact thermal resistance between rough surfaces in extremely thin spaces.

I mean it took me just a couple of minutes of looking to come across this page: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/p/panasonic/thermal-management

 

Not that I'm against trying new things of course but I'm sure if the sheet worked great as a TIM they would've advertised it as such from the get go, ya know because that's just gives em another selling point.

[Levy_Wilson]

You guys used the wrong kind. They make pads that specialize in X/Y axis transfer, which is transfer along the pad itself, and ones that specialize in Z axis transfer, which is from one surface to the other. Wish you guys would have done more research because there are threads on this forum discussing this very thing in regards to the IC graphite pads, including accusations that IC is just cutting and packaging the Panasonic pads. You need to look at Panasonic EYG-S0909ZLX2, EYG-S0918ZLX2, or EYG-S1818ZLX2. The difference between the three are size. First one is 90X90mm, second one is 90X180mm, third is 180X180mm.

It's up there in price, but if you think about it, one 90X90mm sheet will cover the entire 38x38mm surface of four Ryzen processors. So for ~$20 you get 4 thermal pads that would have normally cost $13 each from IC.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Levy_Wilson

[Amaranth]

2 hours ago, Levy_Wilson said:

It's up there in price, but if you think about it, one 90X90mm sheet will cover the entire 38x38mm surface of four Ryzen processors. So for ~$20 you get 4 thermal pads that would have normally cost $13 each from IC.

Plus, as I wrote above, the IC Graphite pad is just a pre-cut  EYG-S0918ZLX2 'Soft PGS' so you should see identical, or nearly identical, performance.

[Dylanc1500]

9 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

This basically just shows that these pads are more a replacement for the IHS than for the thermal pad.

It would actually be great for putting directly onto the cooler and then direct die mounting.

[HenrySalayne]

@AlexTheGreatish

Was there a perticular reason to not use the thicker ones (100 micron)? A thickness of 10 micron seems awfully thin to bridge the air gaps. And is this material compressible?

[Levy_Wilson]

6 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

@AlexTheGreatish

Was there a perticular reason to not use the thicker ones (100 micron)? A thickness of 10 micron seems awfully thin to bridge the air gaps. And is this material compressible?

You're never going to make a perfect seal with these. The point of using thermal paste is to fill micro blemishes on the surfaces on the IHS and heatsink. The PGS is too solid for that. It makes up the difference in its high heat transfer rate, though. The more compressed it is, the better it performs. And the fact it transfers heat along itself so well aides in spreading heat better along the surface of the heatsink, eliminating hot spots on the IHS.