IC Graphite Pads: Better than thermal paste?

I was looking for thermal paste at a computer store near my house a few weeks ago when I stumbled across a relatively new product that I had heard of before but had never seen in person. Alongside tubes of the standard gray tubes of thermal paste, with names that refer to various precious metals and minerals we're all familiar with, I found Innovation Cooling's (IC) Graphite Thermal Pads.

Thermal pads have long been used to cool SSDs and VRAM by mating with heatsinks, but IC's Graphite Thermal Pads (IIRC) are the first pads that can replace thermal grease. The general gist of a graphite thermal pad over thermal paste is that there is no guesswork, no mess, and they are reusable. But are they really superior to many thermal pastes on the market? I decided to find out.

This article provides a brief overview of the performance of IC Graphite thermal pads compared to the stock TIM and IC Diamond in a Dell XPS 15 7590 (i7/16GB/GTX 1650/UHD IPS SKU). It is not intended to be an exhaustive scientific test of the conductivity of IC Graphite compared to every known TIM in a variety of applications, but I believe it will be useful for those who are wondering what to expect from this product and if It is suitable for use in low-pressure heatsink applications such as those found in consumer notebooks such as the XPS 15.

I ran two rounds of testing to determine the overall thermal performance of each thermal solution: Fire Strike and Cinebench R15 in 10 loops. "Stock" could be considered a control group. No undervolting was performed.

Fire Strike Score

IC Diamond delivered the highest Fire Strike score here. While it might be considered disappointing that IC Graphite scores 2 points worse than the standard, it's not a bad score considering that one is a thermal compound while the other is a (relatively thick) graphite pad cut to the size of the CPU GPU dies.

Cinebench R15

IC Diamond wins again here, while IC Graphite performs slightly worse than stock TIM.

Conclusion

IC graphite pads are not going to replace Liquid Metal or other high performance thermal compounds, but I don't think they're trying to. The fact that they can even offer similar performance to the standard paste on a low-pressure mobile heatsink is pretty impressive, and considering it's so easy to remove and reapply, there's certainly a case for those Use of IC Graphite situations. If you want to get the absolute best performance out of your laptop, IC Graphite is not the solution to your CPU/GPU insertion needs. But if you don't want to worry about getting your paste just right or like to open up your heatsink frequently for some reason and are looking for a low-maintenance (not to mention clean and tidy) cooling solution, IC Graphite could make your life easier.

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