Using solid diamond as a cooling solution

[PatL]

I saw this YouTube vid from Steve Mould and he literally cuts ice with a blunt diamond sheet because it’s such a great thermal conductor. Could you do this with a cpu. Could you use industrial diamonds as a heat interface?

 

https://youtu.be/mnDx7GDT7Pc

 

 

[Skiiwee29]

ICdiamond actually has crushed up Diamonds in its thermal paste because of this. 

[PatL]

Yes but could you use a sheet of industrial diamond as a heat spreader?

[Skiiwee29]

1 minute ago, PatL said:

Yes but could you use a sheet of industrial diamond as a heat spreader?

if you could get it thin and flat enough, I don't see why not. They use Graphene pads as well. 

[the gamer that is bad]

20 minutes ago, PatL said:

Yes but could you use a sheet of industrial diamond as a heat spreader?

Probably but think of the cost of the raw material and then the machining

[Spuriae]

Yes, e6 makes them; I don't know if anyone else does. They're meant for applications where you can bond the heat spreader directly to the heat source and heatsink. A very large computer company (won't say who) was considering using something similar for one of their products a while back, but as far as I know nothing came out of it. Unless you have the ability to directly attach the heat spreader to the die, there's not much thermal advantage over using a conventional TIM to connect to heat pipes. Something a manufacturer selling an expensive chip can afford to do, but not something the average consumer would benefit from anytime soon.

12 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

if you could get it thin and flat enough, I don't see why not. They use Graphene pads as well. 

Unless something big has changed since last time I looked, they don't make sense for a CPU cooler. Graphene is only highly conductive in-plane; conductivity through (normal to) a sheet of graphene is worse than many conventional pastes on a macro scale.

6 minutes ago, the gamer that is bad said:

Probably but think of the cost of the raw material and then the machining

CVD deposit a substrate, then remove the diamond layer. Still expensive, but not unattainably so. Good luck machining a thin layer of diamond.

[Vishera]

Silver is the best conductor we know of,That's why most high end thermal pastes use silver in them,

For example Arctic Silver 5 mixes silver,aluminium,other metals and mostly ceramics,ceramics,are not electrically conductive.

 

And Diamonds are Semi-conductors,so you they can conduct electricity.

[Spuriae]

12 hours ago, Vishera said:

Silver is the best conductor we know of,That's why most high end thermal pastes use silver in them,

Diamond can be almost an order of magnitude more thermally conductive than silver at room temperature, but is less commonly used because it is more expensive (and because boundary effects dominate, reducing the impact of extremely conductive filler material).

13 hours ago, Vishera said:

For example Arctic Silver 5 mixes silver,aluminium,other metals and mostly ceramics,ceramics,are not electrically conductive.

Electrically conductive ceramics exist; Indium Tin Oxide is ubiquitous in thin film electronics.

13 hours ago, Vishera said:

And Diamonds are Semi-conductors,so you they can conduct electricity.

Diamond is very electrically insulating (typical type IIa CVD is on the order of 10¹⁸Ωm). Silver is very electrically conductive (order of 10^-8Ωm). Diamond is technically a semiconductor, but its high band gap means it does not conduct electricity in practice unless doped.

[Tan3l6]

Diamond is solid, so no chance of getting a good contact on an imperfect surface.

Thermal pastes containig diamond dost might have a bit better thermal cobnductivity than one without it.