Thermal pads — forced reality

Content

• Introduction
• Searching for the best
• Testing methodology
• Testing results
• Adding thermal adhesive
• Fixing errors
• Conclusion

Fixing errors

Before testing, I was absolutely sure that at least some T-pads will cope with my medium overclocked E8400 CPU. The testing did not work the way I planned, therefore, for more detailed comparison of the T-pad performance, CPU frequency was reduced to 3000MHz, and the voltage was set to 1.0 V. Also, a 15 minutes of Prime95 Stress-test was used in Load mode instead of Linpack. As a result, I managed to avoid emergency PC power shut downs, except for Koolance 1  thick pad testing. Let′s see test results in the summary chart below:

As it is clear, 1 mm thick T-pads have the worst testing results. Koolance 1 mm pads does not stand any criticism. 0.5mm thick pads showed much better results — Phobia pads take first place with a small margin. Quite a serious decrease in temperature was achieved by adding AC Alumina liquid paste on both sides of the pads — in this case the T-pads of 0.5mm thickness almost reached same results as MX-2.