Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Reddit told me to buy this – PTM7950 Thermal Pad”.
Whether it’s your laptop, your PC or your phone personal electronics, get hot and we’re always looking for new ways to make them more comfortable to use which led us to a fascinating new trend on Reddit. Some Intrepid users have been buying industrial grade, cooling, pads and putting them in their laptops, and the more I learned about these things, the more I needed to know see the thing: is they go on like a normal thermal Pad, but they’re designed to melt as soon As your device heats up, then return to a solid state once it cools, and this is without seeping out and frying. Your circuits, like we’ve, seen with other exotic thermal interface materials, but there’s always a catch, isn’t there? Yes, there is, and PTM 7950 here has got a few of them and I’m going to show you what they are, but first I’m going to catch you off guard with this message from our sponsor War. Thunder War Thunder is an immersive and detail-focused Online vehicle combat game that allows you to choose from over 2 000 different machines. You can pilot click, the link below to snag some bonus items. Today, PTM 7950 comes to us from multinational conglomerate Honeywell and while it’s designed for industrial use – and they don’t sell it directly to Consumers, there are obviously ways to get it, as evidenced by the fact that I’m holding some and by this post, we found on the Framework Forum, where user Michael underscore Wu posted some impressive thermal results after swapping to PTM 7950 from a more traditional thermal paste and right out of the gate, the spec sheet raises some serious questions. Most importantly, what the heck is a PCM or phase change material.
Well simply put it’s a substance that can change from one state of matter to another. You know like how a liquid, like water becomes solid ice when cooled or gaseous steam. When heated with. That said, the fact that water can do it is an indication that changing phases is not that special.
What is special about this particular PCM, though, is the temperature at which it changes from one phase to another. Its melting point is 45 degrees Celsius, which happens to be a perfect sweet spot where it would never accidentally melt in a controlled environment like a manufacturing plant, let’s say but pretty much. The second an electronic component started to do any real work. It should immediately begin to change from a solid to a liquid dramatically, decreasing its viscosity aiding thermal transfer. It’S not that different from the operating principle of liquid metal, whose biggest Advantage aside from being metal and therefore very thermally conductive, is that it is so thin and so viscous that it’s able to easily fill any tiny air voids between your CPU and your heatsink air Is an extremely poor heat conductor, which is why our fluffy retropolar fleece is so great at keeping you warm before we go any further.
I want to see this thing in action because I’m just curious like how much exactly does it melt? What are you feeling Brandon? A strip or a square, it’s hip to be square. Oh it’s about cut my thumb off there. It’S like! Oh, oh! No, all right! I didn’t do it right! Okay, a little stick, then, for a comparison, we’ll take some regular old nth2, maybe I’ll just kind of spread it around a bit or something um can confirm. Fire is hot and let’s see what happens to our little pens here. Oh we’re already at uh around 75 degrees, 16. 45. Okay, oh it’s starting to sweat! Brandon come check this out. Given the surface it’s sitting on is well over 45 degrees, that’s not as melty as I expected it to be. Why don’t we give her a little more juice? Okay, now she’s liquid, come check this out, see that actually, I think we might have gone a little too far, uh greater than 130 degrees.
You can see our nth2 is still quite pasty. I mean that’s not really. As liquidy as I expected, it’s certainly different than it was before, but we’ve been informed that it’s at its most liquid when it’s under pressure, which would be the case if it was installed between a heat, sink and a processor. Ah, okay, if I push down on it, while it’s hot, you can actually see oh yeah, it get interesting. Then the second you touch it. It does get quite liquid. There we go. Oh, my cold stick was carrying away too much of the Heat.
It does turn liquid. That was super interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that PTM 7950 is going to work well, so for our performance comparison, we obtained not one but two samples of PTM 7950 from two different sources, and I will explain more about that later. For now, we just want to see this phase changing in action versus a standard thermal paste to start with, we’d recommend storing it in your fridge for at least a couple of hours. Before you begin, maybe you could keep it next to your photo film. It helps make the material a little bit more workable. The first thing you’ll need to do is clean both the core or heat spreader of your processor and your cooler. Then, after measuring the approximate Dimensions cut up your pad with a pair of scissors, you don’t have to get this exactly right, because PTM 7950 is non-conductive and shouldn’t damage anything if it seeps over the edge next peel one side of the pad, and we recommend sticking It to the processor, rather than to your cooler, apply pressure evenly over the pad to help with the next step, then peel the other side, with a pair of needle nose, pliers or or tweezers finally install your cooler compared to my experience with liquid metal, particularly cleanup. If you make a mistake, this was not bad, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it is a lot more finicky than just squirting out some thermal paste, even in an unmelted State. I feel like the term PAD is being used pretty generously here. Ptm 7950 seems to me more like a thin layer of schmoo between two pieces of plastic film that make it a little easier to work with and by a little easier.
I really do mean a little easier, but if the performance is good enough, we know that enthusiasts won’t hesitate to go through a process like that. So, to find out, we sent this knock to Edition RTX 3070 over to our lab, where they put our PTM up against not to his finest thermal paste. Their nth2 and thermal Grizzly conduct a knot and if the conventional wisdom holds true, that pads do not perform as well as pastes and certainly not as well as liquid metal. Well then, it should lose to both of these pretty handily and it does until it doesn’t look at this for the first five minutes. Pcm 7950 totally sucks like you, might as well put cheese whiz on your GPU, but then the magic happens. You can see it.
It starts to change from solid to liquid and five minutes later it’s on par with the nth2. Then five minutes after that it pulls ahead. We tried it on a desktop CPU as well, and while we couldn’t show any difference in temperature, thanks to Intel’s 80 degree Target, we did see a measurable increase in power draw as the pad liquefied which allowed our chip to maintain its turbo speeds. Ever so ever slightly more consistently now to be clear. All of these are very high performance solutions and the difference between the best and the worst of them is so small that, unless you’re chasing every possible Edge, you’d probably consider it to be a tie. But that alone is very impressive and it comes without the risk of getting liquid metal all over your stuff, which can kill it and guess what it gets.
Even better. Take a look at the industries that are using this product, laptops, graphics, cards, sure, but also lighting and Automotive, all of which have one thing in common, very long service intervals. That means that, even if you don’t care about a degree or two of extra performance, the real win here is that you won’t need to replace this pad for the entire life of your device and we’re pretty confident about that. One good thing about products that are designed for highly regulated Industries is that you can expect extremely detailed manufacturer test reports and the one that Honeywell provides for PTM 7950 is a doozy of interest to us in particular. Is the temperature cycling test which alternates between negative 55 and 125 degrees Celsius 1000 times? Ptm 7950 not only passes this test easily, but actually manages to improve its thermal impedance after those 1000 Cycles compared to when it was new? That’S probably why Lenovo started pre-applying this stuff to their Legion 7 laptops in the last year or so to our knowledge. They were the first to use this product in a personal Computing device, but given how secretive the industry tends to be about material sourcing, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if other vendors have been quietly using it for years.
The earliest data sheet we found from Honeywell referencing PTM 7950 is actually from all the way back in 2016., which is great, but there are a couple of loose ends that we haven’t tied up yet, starting with how the devil you’re supposed to get it. Well, remember how I had two different versions of the pad. Well, all the results we’ve shown are from the better one of the two which we believe is the authentic Honeywell version. The thing is, unless you want to actually order. A thousand of these, your only choice, is to buy it from someone who did order, a thousand of them with the markup that comes along with it and most of the ones that we found are from Rando third-party Marketplace, sellers our slightly worse, one came from AliExpress, While our slightly better one came from E by seven, but your mileage may vary and if you guess wrong, it might be a pretty tough pill to swallow because problem number, the second PTM 7950, is not cheap.
A single eight centimeter by eight centimeter pad like this one that might get you what a handful of applications cost the same as a whole tube of nth2 or cost as much as three tubes. If you want to take the safe route and go for a definitely authentic one from Mod DIY, finally, I mean it’s not like we reinvented the wheel here, if you’re after the ultimate in thermal performance, liquid metal is still the way to go, even if it’s only By a hair, but if you want something that you can apply once and have almost Peak to your thermal results for the entire life of your device. Well, maybe it’s time for a phase changing material like PTM and maybe it’s time to end this video with a segue to our sponsor War.
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I hope you did too, if you like these kinds of weird thermal solutions that come from other Industries, maybe check out the time we lowered temperatures by smearing paste all over a laptop and a GPU. That stuff was very messy good, but very messy. .