Thermal Pad/Paste for GPU Upgrades

Hi all, I'm wondering about possible solutions in addition to a repaste that I might do to help with some temps on P150EM's 680M. I have seen around these boards reports of this card running incredibly cool, nearly 10C cooler than like does, even when overclocked. At stock clockspeeds, my 680M can get up to 89C before the fans finally kick it up a notch to send it down a degree or two before going back to their lower RPM. I was doing some research on thermal pads and paste, and wondered if anyone had experience with these:
Fujipoly Ultra Extreme System Builder Thermal Pad - 60 x 50 x 1.5 - Thermal Conductivity 17.0 W/mK - FrozenCPU.com
Would these be better than the stock thermal pads that come in the P150EM with Nvidia GTX 680M? Also, on that note, look at their supposedly 17W/mk. If that is really true, wouldn't these also be significantly better than even the acclaimed IC Diamond thermal paste? FrozenCPU also sells that, and you can see it's only rated for 4.5W/mk:
Innovation Cooling Diamond "24 Carat" Thermal Compound - 4.8 Grams - FrozenCPU.com

So, has anyone here ever experimented with these 17W/mk thermal pads from Fujipoly?

 

No one have any input on this?

 

Remember that thermal transmittance is only one part of it, thermal resistance is the other major contributing factor. Thermal resistance you want to tend to the smallest number you can so no heat is "trapped" in the thermal interface material. The thermal resistance formula directly depends on the thickness of the material, and thats where the thermal pads fall down when it comes to transmitting heat compared to pastes, because the pastes are SO much thinner, then their thermal resistance is much lower than pads allowing them to transmit more heat through them into the heatsink. And for a liquid to have a 4.5 W/mk is really high for that material type. So combined with the thickness thats why something like ICDiamond can "cool" so much better than a thermal pad, as it can conduct MUCH more heat into the heatsink. We tried to put a thermal pad on a 7970m, the laptop shutdown after a minute of testing it got WAY hot (100C+) REALLY fast.

For the thermal pads you had up there, they are a little overkill and won't improve performance of the memory any (its not usually heat bound memory when it comes to OC'ing on vid cards), but they aren't bad. We've used them before.

 

Ahh, good guy mythlogic to the rescue. Thank you very much for your post, I get the feeling mythlogic tests out new ideas on these Clevo machines much more extensively than the majority of builder/reseller.

As far as the pads being overkill, ok that's good you mention it. I hadn't considered the thermal resistance as you mentioned, so that was helpful. Perhaps I will pick up some of the 0.5mm thick ones from another place online (haven't looked much). It's a shame the pads can't be used over a paste, but I guess it makes sense, since a liquid should be much thinner than 0.5mm gen pressed so tightly against the heatsink.

Even if it won't reduce temps drastically, I'd still like to replace the thermal pads, since I've changed the paste once or twice now and the pads have fallen off a couple places and I just put them back as best I could. New ones would surely do a better job.

 

If the pads are visibly suffering, it's worth replacing them.

As stated paste is the best for core contact, and you want to prioritise that and get thermal pads JUST thick enough so that core contact is at it's best.

In MSI machines that's 0.5mm on all the other parts of the card for example, though they tend to be thicker on clevo machines.

 

I replaced the crappy TIM application from Sager on my cpu and gpu with Shin Etsu G751. My temps were never bad in the first place but I figured why not since I was already replacing my 7970m with a 680m. Pretty much any decent paste will do. All of the high end brands will be within 0-2 degrees of each other. Maybe 3 or 4 even but the biggest factor will be in if it is applied correctly. You only want to use enough paste to cover the surface area. Too much or too little will give bad results no matter how good of a paste it is. I prefer a small dab in the middle and allowing the weight of the heatsink/tightening of the screws to spread the paste. Spreading it yourself is more likely to get air bubbles.

Basically buy whatever paste you want that isn't overpriced, apply it correctly and you should see better results.

 

MX-4 for most machines or those new to applying paste IMO, Diamond or another in those with higher pressure heatsinks.

 

Well the nice thing about the MSI machines is there are programs to re-write the fan profiles.

The FN+1 combination only works on sager machines as they requested to keep that functionality in the EC, in all other clevo machines then it wont work (unless you flash the sager EC which has caused issues for people).

 

Hey Meaker, on Sager's Clevos, why is it that the fans can't be controlled again? Is it the BIOS that Clevo gives is too locked down? I don't understand why Clevo's BIOS matters, doesn't Sager make their own? I know there's problems trying to switch between the two.

 

The p series bios is encrypted. Sager gets clevo to write a special version for them.

 

Oh ok. So would it be illegal to decrypt the BIOS for editing or can it just not be done in a reasonable time frame? I mean if its known why the BIOS can't be tampered with, then why has no one tried to undo that?

 

The BIOS aren't encrypted, its just a feature thats enabled on request, (FN+1) it was DISABLED by default this generation because of how the new management engine system works, basically it was depreciated because of how things are now done on the board. The BIOS is pretty darn close to a bone stock Aptio implementation, with a few board specific modifications. The EC is some custom code that is based on a very LONG legacy code base (thats why Clevo MXM/vBIOS have a non-standard temp pin on them which makes the whole dell -> clevo incompatibility).