IC Graphite ThermaInnovation Cooling Graphite Thermal Pad - Alternative To Thermal Paste/Grease (40 X 40mm)

I've been using this for over a year now, first with a 7700K and then a 9700K with a different motherboard. Upgrading processors was so much easier without having to mess around with thermal paste. Just make sure to use tweezers when manipulating the pad, don't touch it with bare fingers to avoid transferring grease. If you're careful with it, you can reuse the pad indefinitely.I'm using this with a DeepCool 240X AiO and my delidded 8-core 9700K with an all-copper IHS running at 5 GHz on all cores never exceeds 70C even under Prime95 blend torture tests, which is a great result. Under normal software loads and gaming, the load temps are only around 20-25 degrees above ambient room temperature which is excellent. Using a good quality thermal paste may probably lower temps even further, but I'd rather have the convenience of the reusable graphite pad. Recommended.

I used this product for my laptop CPU, as my laptop was reaching 96 degrees on load with 4Ghz but when I replaced with thermal pad (and yes you have to cut it) it managed to stay around 91 and 88 degrees on same stress and on 4Ghz obviously it would not perform as regular paste but I'm quiet happy with results especially that performance won't go down at all unlike with paste. It is very simple to use but fragile, and I would recommend it to people who want fine cooling with a trade of not opening your laptop ever again.

Works fine, at least as efficient as stock paste. I have used this with a noctua l9a on both a Ryzen 5 1600 and a Ryzen 7 3700x and later with a Deepcool gammax 120 leakproof AIO.The chassis is an absolute hotbox SFF jobby without a mounting point for the aio so it's wedged in agains a drive cage with only half its surface area having access to ventilation, yet the cpu is still able to boost to 4.3 and doesn't go much more than about 55c d/T over ambient (aka about 75c) running cpuid cpu-z stress benchmark.At the very least, this thermal pad does not appear to be a weak point in the cooling solution, with the whole solution working better than I expected given the cramped conditions.One thing to note... If your cooler is one that you mount from below (such as the L9a) this pad is a massive pain in the butt to apply as it slides around when you try to turn the board over. In such cases you either need an assistant to hold your motherboard up level so you can get underneath or you need a lot of patience, which kind of undoes the benefit of an 'easy to apply' thermal transfer solution.Easy to recommend this product for a cooler that you attach from the topside of the board.Cooling performance was for me only approx 1c hotter than NT-H1 compound that came with the L9a

This is an absolute godsend for anyone that swaps out CPUs regularly. Being able to quickly remove a CPU without needing to reapply thermal paste saves loads of time when testing parts. It is a couple of degrees warmer than paste as it won't fill the gaps quite as well but that is well within tolerances. Probably wouldn't use it for overclocking but it all depends on the overall temperature.

I am running this as the medium between my Ryzen 5 2600X and my Deepcool Captain 240EX cooler. I used it as a replacement for the thermal paste that came on the cooler. I chose this over other thermal solutions as it advertised a higher thermal transfer than other paste solutions I was looking at (35W/MK for this compared to 12.5W/MK for the Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, for instance). I'm sure this information is probably true, too. However, in a case such as that of transferring heat from a CPU heat-spreader to a heat sink there are better alternatives. Of course it's not quite going to really match a liquid-based solution as the imperfections between the surface of the graphite pad and the CPU and heat sink are going to create little pockets of air between the pad and the contact surface which will introduce insulation between the two and reduce the overall effectiveness as a thermal solution.In my experience I think this might have actually degraded my thermal performance, as previous benchmarks in Prime95 didn't even come close to 80C after being under max load for 10 minutes or longer, however with this I ran it and came back to see that after 13 minutes of maximum constant load it had reach 87C.As a disclaimer, I have overclocked my processor so the power draw won't be quite as high with stock and as such you might find better thermals, however I wouldn't suggest it for anything more.If you're building a simple low-power system and you don't plan to overclock, this might be a reasonable solution for you. It's clean, dry and won't degrade in performance over time. The fact it's a single sheet makes it useful for being reusable in other systems too, so if you were to upgrade your processor you wouldn't have to buy more of your chosen thermal solution to be able to cool that off. However for everyone else, I think it's best to go with a paste or liquid metal solution.

Read up on the Xbox One X "Fan Revving issue", wondered if replacing the OEM thermal past with this thermal pad would help. I used a cardboard template to cut a piece of the pad down to perfectly fit the top of the Xbox One X SOC (being careful to ensure that it was placed correctly to ensure that it wouldn't short out the board as the pad is VERY conductive). Upon booting the Xbox One X stayed up on the dashboard for less than 60 seconds before performing an emergency thermal shutdown. I tore down & checked the pad twice before giving up and reverting back to using Arctic 4 thermal paste. I hope this helps anyone else considering using this pad for their Xbox One X, sadly it just didn't work, I'm sure it's great for gaming rigs, but the Xbox One X became immediately unstable. Perhaps the pad is too thin & wasn't able to transfer the heat efficiently into the copper vapor chamber heatsink ... shame :-(