Thermalright Unveils Heilos Thermal Pads Precision Cut For AMD And Intel CPUs
Frankly speaking, thermal goop is a pain to work with. If you're not super-careful, it gets everywhere, and then it's hard to clean off, it can be expensive for how little you get, and you can't really re-use it. The better thermal pastes are often electrically conductive—so it's all-too-easy to damage hardware with careless usage—and the ones that aren't are frequently little better than not using any at all.
Thermal pads like Thermalright's new Heilos have none of these faults. They're solid, so they won't make a mess, and they're not electrically conductive, either. Despite that, they have strong thermal performance; Thermalright lists the heat conductivity of these pads at 8.5 W/mK, which isn't as good as the company's high-end Extreme Odyssey thermal pads, but is still around the same level as typical metal-based thermal pastes.
Thermalright hasn't elaborated on exactly what material is used in these pads, but they look silicone-based, meaning they're not likely to be easily re-usable. That's a fault compared to reusable graphite-based thermal pads like Thermal Grizzly's Carbonaut. However, they're very likely to adhere to the surface on which they're applied, which makes them even easier to install than paste: just stick it on and then slap the cooler down.
As we noted, Thermalright already has a fair-sized catalog of thermal pads, and most of them are higher-performing than the Heilos here. As a result, we expect that these pads will be less expensive than those when they arrive. They'll be available pre-cut for Intel or AMD CPUs, so make sure you grab the right version.
Thanks to FanlessTech for pointing these out.
