More effective solutions to traditional thermal pads?

Hello everyone

I am just curious if by chance anyone has come to some more effective alternative to traditional pads? Maybe some thick graphite paste, sub millimeter copper shims, etc. Or maybe there is some superpad I am not aware of?

As it stands I think I will go for copper shims, starting with say .3mm to see if it stays and work my way up from there to say 1mm, and at the point it stays is the point I add thermal paste on both ends to keep in place. This worked in an older laptop that had no contact with the gpu and heatsink and the cpu was still in good contact with the heatsink. Someone awhile ago did something like this with mxm gpu's with some special high conductivity pads and measured out the individual clearance since the pads have almost no give. If you going to do that however, you might just use copper coated in thermal paste to both stick and not be conductive, unless this has been tried and proven ineffective or dangerous?

Given how much 8 core cpu's overheat, and the fact that faster ram, and hotter components like vrms, or capacitors, I think its more imperative to have a better solution to cooling these. I want to say someone here has gone down this route and has come up with some surprising results.

 

Wowowowow...wow.
Dont have in mind any idea to use smtg like copper shims instead of traditional thermal pad on memory chips of your GPU. Cause anything, except thermal pads or liquid thermal pad will broke your GPU/laptop.
Best, what you can use:
1) Thermal pads if you need thickness from 0.5mm to 5mm ( I prefer Laird or Thermalright Odyssey, cause they are the best products on market with best thermal conductivity)
2) Liquid thermal pads, like CSL K5 Pro. But you should know: Dont apply CSL K5 Pro in a layer more than 0.5mm, because at such a thickness, it loses its heat transfer properties, and becomes a barrier rather than a heat conductor. Liquid thermal pads from Laird doesn't have this disadvantage.

 

I havent been involved in any of this in years What is SMTG?

As for using a shim on the gpu die, that was only because the die literally had no contact with the heatsink, which was a famous issue with dell's a decade ago. As for the VRM,s mempry, etc, I am not aware of anyone even attempting it. Has someone done that and bricked their system?

I dont suppose anyone has done a thermal pad roundup competition like they do with thermal paste? Do show me as I would be curious to see who is saying thermalright are the best pads for laptops, and what they have to show for it.

Per the post, I am also interested in other ways. I remember seeing awhile ago someone showing good results with some very thick thermal gel once.

Update: Okay I see that the gel I was describing was K5 PRO. Thanks for showing me that.

 

As for shim on GPU/CPU Die - you need to solder it to heatsink, like MrFoxRox did ( ). And after that use heatsink as usual - apply thermal paste.
As for memory, VRM and etc. - yes, a large number of buyers of modern 30xx series nVIDIA GPU's see a high memory temperatures (110C) and, on the advice of stupid youtubers, change the thermal pads to copper shims, after which the videocard fails due to the skew of the cooling system (it is difficult to find a copper shim with the same thickness of the thermal pads) or excessive pressure on the fragile GDDR6X chips.

There will be a video from on YT repair guy, who tested all thermal pads in the same conditions. I will provide a link to video when he release it.