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Sony's Thermal Sheet Good As Paste For CPU Cooling
An anonymous reader writes "Sony has demonstrated a thermal sheet that it claims matches thermal paste in terms of cooling ability while beating it on life span. The key to the sheet is a combination of silicon and carbon fibers, to produce a thermal conductive layer that's between 0.3 and 2mm thick. In the demonstration, the same CPU was cooled by thermal paste and the thermal sheet side-by-side, with the paste keeping the processor at a steady 53 degrees Celsius. The sheet achieved a slightly better 50 degrees Celsius. The actual CPU used in the demonstration wasn't identified. Sony wants to get the thermal sheet used in servers and for projection units, but I can definitely see this being an option for typical PC builds, too. It's certainly going to be less messy and probably a lot cheaper than buying a tube of thermal paste."
isn't the advice to have rather less than 2mm paste between the chip and heatsink?
SURELY NOT!!!!!
>> probably a lot cheaper than buying a tube of thermal paste
Normally these come free with the cooling fan IME. Otherwise, a tube of paste is like $5.
>> key to the sheet is a combination of silicon and carbon fibers
Paste MIGHT be cheaper.
..it puts a rootkit on your machine, too.
Thermal paste for a typical CPU installation runs in the pennies, but you do have to buy a whole tube. I'll bet you a dollar this sheet for a single CPU install runs in the dollars. This is Sony we're talking about, they need profitable revenue to offset their sinking Blu-Ray-PS/3 ship, among others.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
...but can it be reused? Can you put it on an entirely different processor after being used? If so, then it would definitely be worth the money... if it were made by somebody other than Sony, that is.
Does that really work? I've heard reports that thermal paste isn't normally very important.....I'm about to install a new processor, and I've been wondering about that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
and "Behold!" cried the archangel, "Sony has done something cool. Tremble with fear all ye nations...."
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
3M has had a thermal sheet which has outperformed paste for more than 10 years already.
How is this news?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
It always seemed to me that applying paste was more of an art than it should be.
This looks like it would be a more repeatable process.
So, does it outperform the high end pastes, like Arctic Silver, or the cheap crap that comes with the 9.99 heat sinks?
There is a margin at least as wide as the one they list between those two substances. If the paste they tested against is anything like the garbage that goes in a PS3 from the factory, I'd expect mud and spit would heavily outperform it.
Just another ignorant American.
It'll probably only work when it's placed between a chip manufactured with a genuine Sony Heat Spreader, and genuine Sony Heat Sink.
probably a lot cheaper than buying a tube of thermal paste
Are you on drugs? This is SONY we're talking about. They're right up there with Apple for "We'll slap our logo on some old, shoddy crap and charge three times the going rate!"
Seriously though, I'd want to duplicate their test setup before I believe their numbers. TIM pads may have superior lifetimes, but pastes tend to have superior surface coverage.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How is this news?
Sony article that doesn't contain the words "Leak", "Compromised", "Stolen" or "Litigation".
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Answering several commenters above and adding some more information as well...
1. Apple tried this out from about 1997 to 2002 in their G3 and G4 laptops and some of the desktops. They tried a variety of "thermal tabs". They worked ok. Sometimes they're quicker to put on, other times they take more time. Some were brittle. They should be available from a variety of sources at this point, not just Sony. They were also used on some of the G5's and mac pro CPUs. They tried quite a few variations over the years, and the most recent on the early mac pros were considered highly hazardous materials and we were advised to wear gloves when handling them and to not let them be exposed to air for any length of time. They may still be using them but the procs come attached to the heat sink so I don't have to handle them directly. All the products I lift heat sinks from have been using regular compound for the last several years. So I assume they figure the tabs are good for manufacturing time but not the best idea for field-repair. They may have been using 3M as a supplier, I don't know.
2. They were more expensive than thermal compound but easier to store a bunch of them in a small box/envelope.
3. I tried to reuse them and mostly failed. They tend to bond to either the heat sink or the die, or both, and get torn up pretty bad when you lift off the heat sink. Usually have to scrape the bits off both surfaces with a plastic spudger before using a new one. Makes taking things apart for test swapout or inspection a bit more of a hassle and a little more expensive.
4. one advantage they had was no spillover. A few systems I've worked with wouldn't tolerate heat sink goop spilling too far over to the ballast resistors or caps mounted near the die on the package. For those you had to be very careful about how much compound you used so it wouldn't squish out and touch something it shouldn't and generate some capacitance that would cause wonky behavior from the cpu. These are idiot-proof that way for the most part. I've also been told about problems with getting an air bubble in with the compound and creating a pocket over the die with no compound on it - I've never had that happen to me personally but I've seen the effect a few times. This isn't possible with the tabs. I've also read cautions for not applying too much compound, as though if you put on too much it wouldn't squish out enough and would create too thick of a layer of compound between die and heat sink but I don't think that's likely to happen considering the viscosity of the compound and the torque of the heat sink.
5. Occasionally we'd get tabs that were the exact size of the die, or a little undersize, and those caused problems getting them on right with full coverage. I also watched a tech forget to replace the new tab, with the expected results, so you may run into a few oops moments when changing your technique.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
At least not until the comments started.
that sheet has to have some type of backdoor in it, its Sony for crying out loud.
Air is a very good insulator, and very poor at conducting heat.
Yes, just like the way diamond is very hard, and not very soft.
Four out of 5 first graders rejected the sheets after a head-to-head taste test.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So you're saying it's less of a thermal sheet and more of a thermal hospital gown?
3M has had a thermal sheet which has outperformed paste for more than 10 years already.
How is this news?
Browsing the 3M pages, I see sheets at about 3 W/mK and grease at about 4 W/mK.
I bought a $3 tube years ago and I still have plenty left. You're only supposed to use a dot the size of a BB. If you smear it all over the CPU you're doing it wrong - aside from the mess, that's guaranteed to create air pockets.
(The cheap stuff is fine too. The expensive stuff may conduct heat better, but the layer of goo is so thin that it's only a fairly small percentage of your heat resistance.)
Still, these pads are interesting. It looks reliable and less prone to noob mistakes. Too bad it's Sony.
1. Temperatures across the same model CPU can vary wildly even with the same cooler/paste.
2. It's not unusual to see different cores on CPU's having up to a 10C difference in temperature even.
3. Software hardware monitors are notoriously inaccurate.
4. Combine 1-3 and the thermal reading done in software from this article means exactly nothing at all.
5. 50C idle is flat out *horrible* for a desktop or server.
6. No information is given on the thermal paste used for the comparison. Maybe they used cheese in a can?
I remember putting together an intel system long ago, the "thermal paste" was roughly equivalent to a piece of double sided sticky tape. I guess whatever was contained in the tape would melt and fill in the cracks similar to paste. This was during the Celeron 300 or Pentium 4 era, if I recall correctly.
moox. for a new generation.
with the paste keeping the processor at a steady 53 degrees Celsius. The sheet achieved a slightly better 50 degrees Celsius.
That's great for Europe and other "metric" countries, but how cool will it keep the chip in the U.S.?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Very true... Also, not all pastes are equal, indeed some are little better than toothpaste. We don't know of course which paste Sony used. Does anyone believe they used the best they could find? {best to prove their point, that is}
Indeed. Another example:
http://www.kerafol.com/en/innovation-in-thermal-management/products-solutions/standard-films/keratherm-red.html
When ever I read about Sony, I recall this one: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2007/may/28/sonyuserscrew
Special 'screw', indeed.
OK, so they got 3C better than the paste in the demo. Was it the cheap stuff you'll get from a no-name OEM or did they run it against something higher quality, e.g. Arctic Silver. Because I usually get more than 3C just by switching paste types.
Don't get me wrong, this may very well be better for Sony for their PS4's or TV's or whatever, and if it's better than cheap paste and easier to handle, great. But outside of factory customers, this probably isn't very interesting.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I just ordered a 5000ml tube of Arctic Diamond paste which I figured would keep me going for a lifetime.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I was kinda wondering this myself, when dealing with a film that is probably down to 1/20 of a mm between the die and the heat sink, is there any significant difference in the performance of the different compounds?
I see places selling "high grade" compound in small dose injectors, usually called "silver" something or other, and it costs 2-4x as much as regular compound. Makes me wonder if it's about as useful as buying Monster Cables.
I bought a CAN of heat sink compound about a decade ago for home. It's a tin the size of a varnish can. I figure for me that'll be a "lifetime supply". (the brand was ThermalCote) I don't know what I paid for it, ($25? been so long) but it'd probably be many hundreds of dollars if bought by the injector applicator fulls. Glad the lid seals nice and tight, it's just like a paint can.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ain't shit new about it besides being silicon and carbon.
I've got copper shim sheets that have far higher thermal conductivity and perform better, and outlast any thermal pad.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
After getting the infamous YLOD on my 60 GB PS3 for the third time, I'm pretty wary of any heat dissipation product put forward by Sony right now...
(Or anything else that has "Sony" written on it, but this in particular.)
Unless you apply thermal paste really, really incompetently, 3C temperature difference is infeasible with typical heat-spreaders on the CPU. This sounds very much like a rigged test. And yes, thermal paste should be 0.1mm or so in thickness.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But isn't it ridiculously expensive?
The paste could magically deliver money to my bank account and I still wouldn't buy it.
I utterly refuse to willingly spend a cent on any Sony product. I suspect you know why; for those who don't, there's Groklaw.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Man I can't stand those one-size-fits-nobody hospital gowns. Walking in them and feeling self-conscious about somebody looking at my pasty white butt cheeks. That's why I wear the slit to the front instead.
Look under 3M thermal pads... Up to nearly 5 W/mK
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.