 Most thermal compounds have a thermal conductivity of about 10 to 20 watts per meter Kelvin with really good ones reaching 30 or so. The king of all thermal compounds, Liquid Metal manages a whopping 73 watts per meter Kelvin. But while browsing Newark, an industrial supplier, we found this, the Panasonic Pyrolytic Graphene Sheet, or PGS, with an incredible thermal conductivity of 1,950 watts per meter Kelvin. But wait, that would make this thermal pad 20 times as conductive as Liquid Metal. Is that even possible? Can I do a 360 during this sponsor segue? Is that even possible? Oh yeah! Ting wants to help you save money by getting you to pay for only the mobile data you use. Stick around until the end of the video to hear about their giveaway or click the link in the video description. ["Skype Rift"] Before we get started, I need to show you this because it's just absolutely amazing. Okay. Just getting a little R&R and thinking about how my circuit board over here can handle all this heat. In fairness though, pyrolytic graphite really is a super cool substance, much cooler than that video. It's manmade and cannot be found in nature. And while the actual process of fabricating pyrolytic graphite is a bit over our heads, it sounds pretty sweet. Basically, you take a hydrocarbon like methane and put it under a vacuum of about one torr or about 1 760th of atmospheric pressure. Then you heat up the methane to 2000 degrees Celsius and slowly about a thousandth of an inch per hour, a layer of graphite grows. This creates perfect hexagonal carbon sheets that lie on top of one another. What are they gonna think of next, right? The shape of the carbon crystals also makes pyrolytic graphite the most diamagnetic material by weight, meaning that it's repelled by magnetic field and can be levitated. Unfortunately, we don't have a magnet big enough to try it. And we'd probably want a slightly thicker sheet of graphite, but look, here's a cool video of someone else doing it. Go check it out at the link below. This also makes it excellent for electromagnetic shielding for use in things like radio towers and satellites. Of course, we are not here for the magnetic properties. You haven't even opened this, have you? No. You have no idea if this is gonna work. Not at all. We wanna look at its thermal properties. The most thermally conductive substance in the world is a diamond with a thermal conductivity of around 2200 Watts per meter Kelvin. So we're getting very close here to the limits of thermal conductivity with that insane value of 1950 Watts per meter Kelvin. Apparently the thermal conductivity of this stuff is so great that you can use a sheet of it to slice through an ice cube using just the heat of your hand. It's this thin with an adhesive? So it's a 10 micrometer of graphite and I think six micrometers of adhesive. So how do I get this adhesive off? I can't even get a fingernail in there. Can you see it going in? What if we add more heat? Holy crap, it's actually going faster. I can tell easily. I don't know if I have the patience for the whole thing but it definitely sliced into it. Check this out. And you can actually tell it's sliced in more on the side that doesn't have the adhesive on it. We really need to figure out how to remove that. What if we scraped off a corner of the graphite? Yeah, there you can see the plastic sheet there. Okay, I think I've got it peeled. There we go. Oh my goodness, it's so thin. I think we're good. I think I got it apart. So this insane thermal conductivity means that pyrolytic graphite is used in, you know, low stakes applications like the nose cones of missiles, rocket motors, nuclear reactors, and even heart valves of all things. But of course, this is Linus Tech Tips. We wanna know if it's good for cooling computers. Curiously, one of the main selling points of PGS is its use in electronics, but it seems like the marketing focuses on thicker, less thermally conductive versions rather than the thinner, much more thermally conductive kind that I'm holding. This one is just 10 micrometers thick. Also curiously, it seems that for the thicker thermal pads that Panasonic makes, they've basically glued together a bunch of thin thermal pads with a thermally conductive glue. Now compared to other thermal pads, these offer excellent performance, but neither of those are gonna cut it if we wanna get the most performance, ah, there it is, out of our CPU here. Before we test this out though, we need a baseline. Now we already pre-ran using Noctua's NTH2, but there's already a graphite thermal pad on the market for computers. This is the Innovation Cooling Graphite Thermal Pad, and we looked at it a couple of years ago. It doesn't keep up with a high quality thermal paste, but it's good enough, it's reusable, it creates no mess, it lasts basically forever, and it can withstand temperatures that your processor will never see. We actually really like this, especially for test benches. One problem with the IC graphite thermal pad though is that it is electrically conductive. Apparently that is not the case with PGS. My script just says from here, things get loose and probably weird. That sounds about right. That is not a lot of resistance, two ohms? Yeah, something like that. Okay, let's try this. Okay, that's very similar. About the same. With that out of the way, frankly I have no idea what to expect now, because already the spec sheet doesn't seem to be entirely forthcoming with real information about the product, and there's gotta be a reason that people aren't using this stuff. I have concerns about the thickness. Yeah, that's my concern as well. Like even just micro imperfections in the bottom of the heat sink or CPU seem like this isn't gonna bridge the gap. Yeah, and there's stuff like, I think Noctua's thermal compounds not as thermally conductive as a lot of other ones, but it works better because it's just better at spreading out and filling in those gaps. It's also like, think about how sick it would be to be able to just install one of these on the bottom of a cooler and just never worry about it again. Yeah. Wait, we don't know what the thermal conductivity of that adhesive is though. It's quite high. Oh, okay. There's our innovation cooling pad. Now we can throw our NH-D14 on here. D15. Is this a D15? Yep. Well, there you go. It has your name on the box and you don't even know what it is. I'm more of a single tower cooler guy. What? The dualies are the best. I know, but they're so unwieldy. That's like part of the appeal though. Our test bench is a Core i9 10900K and we're running the blender classroom test, which is gonna take us about six or seven minutes giving us a good idea of where it's gonna top out. Yeah, for the NTH-2, our average temperature was 86.4 degrees and the max was 90. So that's what we're going to be. I found this by just sorting most thermally conductive on the website. And I was like, wow, that's really, really thermally conductive. As expected, that's a little worse. So I'm doing some rough in head math and I'm gonna say 93 and a half. 93, not bad. Yes. That's worse, but it didn't thermal throttle. And that's all we really need because that means we know that the thermal output through the duration of the test was the same. So we can shut it down now and take a crack at this. I brought over a dowel pin so that we can try and smooth it out. Sure, it's actually probably not a terrible idea. I mean, this whole thing is kind of not really a great idea, but like- Should we adhere to the heat sink or to the CPU? I kind of liked your idea of doing it to the heat sink. Yeah, because that would be so awesome that you would be able to just never worry about it again. Yeah, okay. Once it sticks on there, it's pretty sticky. So that's good for us to know about right about now. Oh lordy. Okay. So here's the plan. Hmm. Like how it was just here's the plan and then nothing. There is no plan. That's what I'm trying to say, Alex. Charge! Good job, Linus. It looks like there's some like junk under there though, doesn't it? You know what? Forget it. No, no, no, no, I'm out, I'm out. Try again. Oh, that's way better. I'm glad we didn't even bother to test the other application. If we discovered a fantastic and affordable new thermal interface material, you can bet you'll find it soon on lttstore.com. Marked up, of course. Well, this stuff is only like $7.50 for a sheet of it. Like that size. Wait. We spent $40 on this little pack? Yeah. If our idle temps are anything to go by, this may actually work. Of course, idle temps tell us not much of the story. We're also like just on the cusp of thermal throttling, which is kind of unfortunate, but. Well, that's fine because if it doesn't perform as well as the IC pad, then it doesn't, it's irrelevant. So I don't think it's gonna work. Not as well as this pitch for lttstore.com anyway. All right. I want it to work because I want it to be like, oh, we found a thing that's so cool. But my hope level is quite low. And we're done, bud. Oh no. And it's terrible. Ooh, ooh, we dropped like 400 megahertz off our CPU. What if we put another layer on the CPU to try to, you know? Curiously, the contact patch actually isn't even that bad. It does only contact this area here, but that's basically the die. So it's kind of all that matters. Well, it's about half. It's about half of the die. The die on the 10900K is pretty big under there. You know what? I want to try it. I want to put another layer on the CPU. Okay, screw it. How did you do this last time? Good luck, everybody. Oh, oh, hi. Hey, oh yeah. Got a fan going over there. That's not great. I kind of took out one of the things here. If it doesn't do worse, I guess I can accept that as sort of a small victory. F12 to... Pay respects. Okay. Okay, so it's not great for this application, but that's fine because nobody advertised it as being great for this application. One of the other things it is apparently good for is heat transport. So you might think, okay, well, hey Linus, okay, it's not that great for moving heat from the CPU up to the heat sink, but what if it could spread it out a lot? Well, problem is that it's not nearly as good as a heat pipe. Those can get up to a hundred thousand Watts per meter Kelvin because they aren't relying on just conduction. Instead, they're using convection and phase change cooling together to move the heat around like real quick styles. Some random other use cases for this stuff include apparently phones, heated steering wheels, which I thought was pretty cool. That would be a really neat way to kind of move the heat around from the element to spread it out more evenly. Heated seats, again, to spread heat out more evenly. Servers, very vague, but apparently they're good for servers. And radio antennas, which we mentioned before. As for using it to cool your computer, well, not unless you want to run at, you know, 98 degrees cause you just missed the nineties that much. Our sponsor Ting does mobile phone service differently. There's no contracts, no overage fees or any other carrier tricks. You just pay a fair price for the talk, text and data that you use each month. 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We do that all the time. Yeah, check out the crazy cooling the laptop with the Bluemetron server fan, got it to five gigahertz that Alex and I did ages ago. You know, we could also throw people to another thing that didn't work. Like when we harvested the thermal interface material from between Intel. No, no. Let's throw them to like the MacBook video. Like we are. How about all three?