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This is thermal paste. At least according to Noctua, who's partnering with Carbise to bring their carbon nano tube thermal pads to market. Or at least bring them to the gaming and PC enthusiast market. Carbise actually began shipping these to industrial and space customers almost 10 years ago, which has given them plenty of time to perfect their performance and their manufacturing. So, let's talk first about the advantages. One is super easy installation. Just peel and stick. There's no risk of applying too much or getting poor coverage on the hot spot of your chip. Then when it's time to clean up, you just pull it off. No mess, no residue. But that's a sales pitch we've heard before, and it usually comes at
the cost of performance. How about these? That's where things get a little complicated. Our labs team first got their hands on carbise thermal pads several months ago and they found that depending on your setup, you can see temperatures that are four, six, or even 12° worse than a high performance thermal paste like PTM7950 available on ltstore.com or even Noctua's own Nth2. So then, how could a company like Noctua, who prides themselves on rigorous engineering, endorse such a poor solution? To find out, we need to travel through time. Through time, through time. Whoa, I'm in the future now. My CPU has been through many thermal cycles, getting hot while playing games or doing work and then cooling back down. And
Noctua found that after a few thousand such cycles, liquid thermal compounds could actually degrade in performance. And at the same time, carbise thermal pads could break in improving in performance to the point where there is a threshold that lowerformance thermal pad will improve enough and the thermal paste will degrade enough that the pad starts to outperform it. So then now that you're interested, let's dive a little deeper into how it works, take a look at some other product updates from Noctua, and tell you about our sponsor, Meter. Meter builds enterprisegrade networks from the ground up. Go to meter.com/ltt to book a demo now. That's me.com/ltt to book a demo.
Carbon nano tubes or CNTs are incredible. They're lighter than carbon fiber, stronger than steel, and more thermally conductive than copper. Unfortunately, they're also pretty much the poster child for advanced materials that promise to revolutionize entire industries and then take forever to go from the lab to the shelf at the local Best Buy. carbon nano tubes. See, for all of their strengths, CNTs have some distinct weaknesses that can make them a little challenging to work with. And the first one is quite literal weakness. While CNTs are flexible, they're also just really, really tiny, like on the
scale of single nanometers. So, even if you grow them with multiple layers of walls, you have to take measures to keep them from being damaged. The other big one which is uh very important for this application is their anisotropic nature. In simple terms, moving heat through a carbon nano tube is kind of like moving water through a straw. It goes really well lengthwise, but the walls actually act as an insulator. So, Carbise's solution was to use a tiny about 50 micrometer thick aluminum substrate, then deposit a dense forest of carbon nano tubes on both sides. This allows individual tubes to support each other. Kind of like how you can't bend over when you're packed onto a Japanese train and also helps to ensure that
every tube is oriented correctly, either taking heat away from your CPU or transferring it towards your cooler. So far so good. But there's another problem that is not so easily solved. At a microscopic level, both your cooler and your CPU are covered in imperfections that reduce thermal conductivity. Now, thermal paste gets around this by, you know, flowing into all those little microscopic gaps. But carbon nanot tubes, they're a solid. They don't flow. So, how do they get in there? Two ways. First, they take advantage of the spring-like flexibility of CNTs to sort of bend and stretch and compress, working their way into these tiny little surface imperfections. Carbice can grow
their forests to different thicknesses depending on just how uneven the target material might be. Intel, excuse me, sorry. Then they add a polymer coating that helps to increase the surface area at the tip of each nano tube that gradually impregnates the entire forest during the activation period of the thermal pad. And it's these last two factors that help to explain the long burnin time of carbise ice pads. From Noctuous testing, they found that it could take on the order of thousands of thermal cycles to realize the full benefit of one of these pads versus a more traditional paste. So, if you're a tinkerer who frequently reapplies your paste, this product is probably not for
you. But if you're anyone else, they believe that you might hit this crossover point right here sooner than you realize. Now, I initially assumed that by thermal cycles, they meant, you know, like powered off all the way to full load and then powered off again. That might happen only once a day, which means this would take like 10 years, but it actually happens more often than you think because it's more like every time you cross between about 50 to 60° C on both sides of the pad. That could easily happen multiple times in a single session. But that still doesn't mean that ice pads are ideal for everything. At this time, Carbise is not promoting them for bare die cooling. and Intel's
notoriously uneven heat spreaders mean that you might have to wait a little while for thicker pads to be available in the future. These ones, Noctua is only talking about using them on AM4 and AM5. Also, we found that even on AMD, if you're using a high performance water cooler, there was less benefit. Maybe because the pad doesn't heat up enough for break-in on the cold plate side. Still though, for long lasting air cooling on AMD, which is, you know, most users, there does seem to be a compelling pitch here. The last downside though is reuse. While a tube of thermal goop can be used for multiple applications, a single carbise pad costs
about the same or more than that entire tube and is only guaranteed for a single application. And that's probably for good reason. We found that the polymer coating can create a little bit of adhesion between your CPU and the pad. It's not hard to clean up or anything, but even if you're careful, this can result in some of the nano tubes being left behind when you peel up the sheet. Now, let's take a quick look at the progress Noctua has made on some of their other major announcements from last year. The AIO cooler that Noctua has been building in partnership with ASET is back and looking very close to
release now. They've got solid numbers showing both the improvement in sound level thanks to their acoustic dampening materials over the pump as well as sound quality compared to a standard AIO or especially an AIO that has a big screen resonator bolted onto the top of the pump. On the subject of bolting things on, they've got a pretty good sales pitch for the VRM cooling fan that can magnet on top of their AIO. They found that with this installed, you could actually cut your case fans all the way from 100% down to about 40% and still maintain better VRM temperatures with an overall noise reduction. As for the other AIO, the pumpless one that I'm really excited about, they have been
hard at work on this one. It is not looking that close to release, but they've made huge progress completely re-engineering the cold plate to resolve the issue that they were having where an insulating vapor barrier forms, preventing heat transfer. The solution uses a combination of clever geometry that keeps the liquid flowing within the evaporator head and a centered copper coating that maximizes surface area and minimizes insulating bubbles. The result, instead of showing a light gaming load like last year, they're showing a full OCCT stress test on a 9950X3D that is running just a handful of degrees hotter than the pumped unit that is right next to it. That's crazy. As
for the partner products table, I think the highlight for me has got to be the partnership with KA AI doing cooling on their new generation driving assistance box. Man, no is freaking everywhere these days. And you know what else is everywhere? This message from our sponsor meter. As your business scales, especially across multiple sites, your network setup needs to scale along with it. Things like vendors, ISPs, or even basic tools your team needs can become an absolute nightmare just to juggle, which robs your IT team of valuable time and resources. Well, Meter builds enterprise level networks from the ground up, consolidating everything from wired, wireless, and cellular networks into one powerful full stack platform.
Whether you're managing massive warehouses, corporate offices, or entire campuses, Meter handles the heavy lifting. From design and deployment to end-to-end management, Meter will deliver high performance connectivity across any space, all to ensure predictable and repeatable outcomes. So, your network engineers are spending less time putting out fires and more time doing important work. And Meter has transparent and predictable pricing, so budgeting is easy. Go to meter.com/ltt to book a demo now. That's me t.com/ltt to book a demo. If you guys enjoyed this video, how about a throwback to the time we did the all knock to a PC. Feel like we're overdue for another
