Recently heard about Thermal pads instead of paste, had never crossed my mind this could be a thing. Very curious to how good these actually are and if they perform any better? Also what does their lifetime look like? If anyone here has any experience with these please let me know 🌻
Generally they’re for uneven surfaces like multiple chips on a PCB (RAM, SSDs, etc.) or where there’s a gap between the chip and the heatsink (e.g. something using the chassis as a heatsink).
There’s also thermal epoxy, which glues the heatsink to the chip, like with smaller cards that don’t expect to have the heatsink removed.
For a CPU or GPU, paste is still better.