Thermal GrizzlyThermal Grizzly - PhaseSheet PTM (50x40mm)- High Performance Thermal pad with Phase Change Material | Durable, not electrically Conductive | for CPU, GPU & Electronics Cooling

If you're reading through reviews on this stuff, chances are you're looking to find out how it differs from standard thermal paste, and whether it's worth your time. Hopefully I can help you with that.Thermal Grizzly's Phase Change pads have many advantages over paste. Since I like to start reviews with the good, let's look at a few.Thermal paste dries out, and when it dries it loses its ability to conduct heat. It's a good practice to repaste every couple of years because of this. If you're the type of computer user who upgrades often, this probably won't apply to you since you're either getting rid of your old system before that paste dries, or you're constantly re-applying it anyway as you change cooling solutions or upgrade CPUs. On the other hand, if you like to run your systems as long as possible, these pads are for you--they DON'T dry out. Pretty nice stuff if you're going to be using them in a server or a system that won't see much in the way of regular maintenance.These pads also don't suffer from "pump out." Since your CPU and heat sink are usually made of different materials, they expand and contract at different rates. Over time, more and more paste gets pushed out until you've got areas with poor coverage. Phase change pads are solid at room temperature, and they turn into a sort of paste under high heat: your pads are expanding and contracting right along with your heatsink and CPU rather than being pushed out.I've repaired enough computers in my time to know that most of you don't apply thermal paste properly to begin with. Most folks fall into the "more is better" mindset and make a proper mess, like they're making a peanut butter sandwich. Others use far too little and have a lot of area uncovered. These pads take all the guesswork out of that by completely covering the die with a uniform layer.Also, if you're careful while removing your heat sink, you might be able to reuse the pad. It's solid at room temperature, remember, and it never dries out.If all that sounds good to you, here's how you use it.First, store the pad in the refrigerator until you're ready for it. It's solid enough at room temperature, but it'll rip less easily if it's cold. While the pad is chilling, remove your heatsink and clean off all that old paste. (Told you you use too much of it.) 99% rubbing alcohol works great for this. Take your pad out of the fridge, and line it up to your CPU surface. Use a Sharpie marker to mark off the length and width, then cut the pad to size.Now for the fun part: peel one side of plastic off the pad. Lay the exposed pad on your CPU, then press it down. Use your fingers to roll any air bubbles out of it. Then CAREFULLY... SLOWLY... peel the top plastic off. The pad is going to want to stick to the plastic more than it's going to want to stick to your CPU, so be patient with this. Once done, carefully install your heatsink (try not to slide it around, which might wrinkle the pad).Time to test temps, right? Well, no... not exactly. The pad needs a few hot/cold cycles in order to work its way into all the microscopic nooks and crannies. The general recommendation is to run a stress test for ten minutes, then power down the system to let things completely cool. Ten cycles like this is what most people recommend, but I've found four or five is enough. This is where Youtube reviewers tend to mess up, by the way: they'll slap on a pad, immediately run a stress test, then conclude the pads aren't as good as paste. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once cycled, you very likely will be getting lower temps than you would have gotten with tried-and-true paste.And you'll never have to apply it to that system again. That's my way of addressing the main disadvantage of the pads, which is that you could buy a tube of paste for what you're paying here. On the other hand, you're going to be applying that paste over and over again--and probably using too much of it anyway. (Don't worry, that's the last time I'll berate you for this.)The other downside is how meticulous you have to be about applying it. Just slow down and take your time. If the pad does rip, do your best to fix it and you should be fine.Highly recommended!

Favorable temperatures relative to paste when applied to my 7950X (16C/32T) -- attached image is result following a 30 minute compile job. Cooling solution is ThermalRight Peerless Assassin (dual tower air cooler).Temps are a little better than paste and a little worse than liquid metal. No risk of destroying your equipment like with liquid metal. Reusable unlike paste. A little annoying to apply, but not as bad as liquid metal. Like liquid metal, performance does not degrade over time and requires little or zero maintenance.Ultimately, the cooling solution itself will be far more impactful than the choice of thermal interface material.It has a few quirks of it's own. The slab of material is probably a little too thick. Anyone who has worked with LM knows that less is more and too much worsens thermal performance. I suspect the same is true here as well, but because the material is solid at room temperature there isn't a good way to apply less. Checking to see that everything is good is kind of a pain, because the material needs to go through multiple heating/cooling cycles before temperatures become stable. When leaving idle, temperatures will ramp to around 55C almost instantly while the material is changing phase before coming back down. Obviously this isn't an issue in terms of hardware safety, but it cause some intermittent weirdness with acoustics where fans will aggressively ramp up and then instantly back off unless you tune your fan curve to account for this behavior.All up, I really like it. It manages to keep most of the advantages while eliminating most of the disadvantages of each. No maintenance and no risk of destroying components is great quality of life. No solution is perfect and every solution has tradeoffs.I'll probably use this TIM in most of my future builds.

This stuff works great, I bought this for my laptop because the Arctic MX-6 paste I have been using rapidly degrades in performance. The initial performance is amazing, but it takes only about a month for it to cool like some old dried out paste that was five years old or something. This product keeps my laptop almost as cool while gaming, but is expected to maintain that performance for a very long time. I had no issues at all installing it for the first time, I suggest reading and following the instructions that are provided for best results. The only thing I wish I had done differently was to have a micrometer to measure the CPU and GPU die size instead of just eyeballing it, and to have a sharper set of scissors to cut the pad down.

They seem to work well. Easy to use when you put it in the freezer for a bit. Just make sure you take off the plastic! It takes a few days to break in but you should see a 5-10 degree difference in temperatures. I did atleast.

I bought this stuff to re-paste a couple of GPUs. You get enough to cover two GPU dies (though maybe only one for the newest high end stuff). It's a little tricky to work with the stuff. I cooled it down in the freezer for a few minutes before application, which involved marking the size I wanted, cutting with a sharp pair of scissors, removing one side of the protective film, placing on the GPU die, and very carefully removing the other side of the protective film. The stuff sticks better to the film than it does the die so you have to be fairly careful when removing it. I used a pair of electronics tweezers which worked pretty well. The performance is top-notch. I saw a huge drop in temperatures, though obviously the cards were running hot and needed re-pasting. I have noticed no change in thermal performance over several months, so there appears to be no issue with pump-out or longevity.