Thermal pad recommendations

[A1Mike_W]

I was looking to get your thoughts on the effectiveness of thermal pads as I've not seen much discussion about them. All I've heard is that Fujipoly seems to be one of the best brands but I wanna know what you guys think.

I've also heard of coupling thermal pads with thermal paste to even out the surface of the pads in extreme situations - is it worth messing around with?

[Enderman]

1) never use thermal pads for GPU or CPU, only for stuff like vrms and memory chips.

 

2) thermal pad + thermal paste will always perform, worse than just thermal paste.

You're literally adding just another bottleneck to the heat transfer process.

 

3) thermal pads always perform worse than thermal paste.

[Mick Naughty]

Well some laptops have a pad between the cpu as that’s how they were designed. Paste would be worse in that scenario. 

 

Seen a a few builders put paste down for pads. Haven’t tried it myself as I have no way to test it overall. 

 

Never find many vendors when I look so I stick to Fuji or something similar. 

Only really got it for custom backplate stuff though.