Graphite Thermal Pad – Permanent Replacement for Thermal Paste/Grease (30 X 30 mm)

Works extremely well, the 40x40mm size is perfect for AMD AM4 processors. Since it's not a paste, there is no worry of it drying out over time, and it transmits heat to the Heatsink very well. And the fact that you no longer need to clean up Thermal paste if you need to remount a cooler or change CPU's is a godsend.The pads are easy to apply, make sure the CPU IHS surface is clean and dry. Place the pad on top using a pair of flat tweezers. And then, mount the CPU cooler, using the same tightening procedure you would for paste.. I recommend having any backplate or bracket changes done before applying the pad.The fact that this is a 2-pack adds quite a bit of value, as similar products cost the same amount or more for a single pad.

I have been building my own gaming rigs every few years for about 2 decades now. I am old school, thermal paste is the only way to go. Then a friend told me he tried this exact one on his new build and it was working great! Well, I wasn;t building a new rig but had not cleaned out my current one in too long. So I decided to break it down and clean it out really good and replace the thermal paste with this to try it out.This works great! Even better performance than my old fashioned thermal paste....LOL! Easy to apply/use and it was completely compatible with my processor/heatsink combo.It has been in for a while now and I seem to be getting the same performance out of it as the day I put it in. Durability is not a concern!

This is amazing, I have a laptop that suffers from extreme pump-out. My performance degraded so much after only a few weeks after repasting. This provides me 1:1 same benchmarks as repaste does on the first day except it doesn't pump out at all or degrade obviously. Some ppls in reviews saying it's not as good as thermal paste but that's definitely not my experience lol

I'll preface this comment by stating credentials: I am starting my PhD in Systems Engineering, I have a MS in Mechanical and a BS in Mechanical. Concentrations are in thermal sciences - specifically heat transfer. As I write this, I am still performing load tests. I will provide - briefly - overview of the science behind why thermal paste (in general) works and the compare it to this product. Additionally, the vendor was very nice and polite, so that's a half-star in itself. They could be selling me dirt in a desert and as long as they're polite and helpful, they'd still get at least a half-star.Thermal contact resistance is a killer in the world of heat transfer. Microscopic imperfections within a material's surface can cause "no-contact" points and can bottleneck the heat transfer process. As a result, thermal paste is added to "fill in" these "gaps" and allow for heat transfer to occur at them, this increasing the overall amount of heat that is transferred, effectively lowering surface temperatures. This thermal resistance not able to be calculated, and must be measured 99% of the time.What my concern was with this product: That the graphite pad would not effectively "fill" these gaps that thermal paste does.Now for the analysis:I built a rig to run FEA analysis as well as to play video games last week. My processor is an i7 9800X, 3.8 Ghz, Asus Prime x299 motherboard with 128 GB of ram. Everything is SSD. and my cooler is a liquid cooled, Kraken x73 (3 120mm fans and pump speed is 2100 rpm). Ambient temperature in my home is 72F. And the PC had sufficient time to cool down between runs. Running two identical loads on my PC, utilizing all 8 cores of the CPU at 100% for ~1 minute, the average temperature that I get with a high-quality thermal paste is ~142F. With this thermal pad, it is ~149F.The differences are minor and there are tradeoff, of course. If you are building a rig for gaming, this pad would be just fine for you. If you are building a medium rig for FEA processing and are around 8-10 cores, then this might be pushing it. I would not recommend this pad for the serious workstation that utilizes more than 10 cores.There is also the topic of maintenance. You don't really need to replace this pad, versus changing thermal paste every year or so. for a 7 degree difference, I'll take the pad over the paste. This is well within the temperature operation range. All in all, unless you're doing some legit work for a high end developer, this pad should suit you just well. I would not recommend this be reused, however. The pad is mildly springy, and thermal resistance is a function of contact pressure. Don't jinx it. Buy a new pad, do not reuse.*** TLDR: differences are trivial. Will probably work fine unless you're running complex multicore calculations at 100% on a CPU of 12 cores or greater. I will keep this pad on for the time being. I recommend the purchase if you are a gamer or you are doing non-intensive processing work ***