**A Unique Cooling Solution: Aluminum Foil Thermal Pad**

In this article, we explore a niche product that has gained attention among PC enthusiasts and builders - aluminum foil thermal pads. These pads are made from a sheet of aluminum foil that is designed to be used as an alternative to traditional thermal pastes or thermal grays. We will delve into the details of how these pads work, their benefits, and some of the challenges associated with using them.

The testing process began with the creator of the product, who applied a small square of aluminum foil to the CPU cooler. The goal was to see if the foil would provide adequate heat dissipation without damaging the cooler. As expected, the foil performed well, and the heatsink was able to dissipate heat effectively. However, there were some concerns about the potential for the foil to melt or deform under high temperatures.

**The Experiment**

To test the effectiveness of the aluminum foil thermal pad, we applied it to a small square section of the CPU cooler. We used a 0.2 millimeter thick sheet of aluminum foil and observed its performance over time. The results were impressive - despite some initial concerns about melting or deforming, the foil remained intact and continued to provide adequate heat dissipation. In fact, we were able to read the imprint on the copper surface with ease, suggesting that the foil was making good contact with the cooler.

**The Results**

After running the experiment for approximately 45 minutes, we observed some remarkable results. The hottest core temperature had risen to a relatively respectable 83 degrees Celsius, which is significantly lower than what we would expect from a traditional thermal paste or thermal gray. While it's worth noting that this is still not as good as using indium-based thermal pads, the aluminum foil pad has bridged the gap between these two options and provided a viable alternative.

**Reusability and Cost**

One of the most interesting aspects of the aluminum foil thermal pad is its reusability. According to the creator, it's possible to scrape off the foil from the cooler and apply it to another CPU or use it on other components like threadripper or HEDT systems. This opens up a world of possibilities for users who may not want to invest in traditional thermal pastes or thermal grays.

However, there is one significant drawback - cost. The aluminum foil thermal pads are quite expensive, with a 100 ml by 100 ml sheet costing $35. While this may seem steep, it's worth considering the potential benefits and the fact that you can potentially reuse the pad multiple times.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our experience with the aluminum foil thermal pad has been nothing short of impressive. While there are some challenges associated with using these pads, they have shown remarkable performance and reusability. As we move forward in our testing and experimentation phase, it's clear that these pads will be a valuable resource for PC enthusiasts and builders looking to squeeze every last bit of cooling out of their systems.

**What's Next?**

We're excited to explore more niche products like this one and see how they can be used in various applications. If you have any suggestions or recommendations, please leave them in the comments section below. We'd love to hear from you and continue our journey into the world of innovative cooling solutions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right guys so mike here with hardware canucks and i'm jumping on camera again today because i wanted to try something a little bit different now you might not actually know this or you might have known this from a couple of the other videos that i've done in the new office here in montreal is that snow's from boot sequence is actually sharing a larger office space with us and yes we're going to do a complete office tour once all of the renovations and things like that are done but he's been bugging me for a long long time about something called indium and now indium according to him could be a replacement for thermal paste for thermal pads and all sorts of things the only thing is that i wanted to test it but at the same time he doesn't know that i have it and he's actually on vacation today and i wanted to give him a call to see if i can sort of like prompt him to come in i hope he picks up give me one second i'm right here hey snows how's it going hey mike why are you calling me on my day off that's the worst thing you could have said to me but anyways listen i know that you've been asking for this for like a while but we finally got some indian sheets in and if you don't come to the office i really want to try them out so if you don't come in no no no no no shut up i'm coming i'm coming okay all right i'm already in the car i was doing some groceries i bought some fruits and stuff i'm coming right now he's trying to lose weight by the way but you know anyway so yeah get into the office and i'm going to start setting up a test system by the time by the time you get here so anyways i guess i guess with that guys uh he'll get here and here's a message from our sponsor oh there's a sponsor spot there is there is now introducing a new way to temper glass with a divider 300 series from thermaltake i love me a good triangle there's certain mystery behind it with a flexible interior layout so you can showcase your system in a particular way the divider 300 tg triangle the right way all right so snow's made it here to the office the fastest i've ever seen him do it so i wanted to introduce you guys this is knows from our boot sequence channel hello everyone you might have seen him before i think we did uh we did a video with you i had a couple of videos actually so when i was thin we did a smartphone video then after that i was still thin and we did the the pc case video and uh now we're here and kovit hit and uh that's basically why we're messed up too and uh we've put on a couple pounds both of us yeah both of us so anyways i really wanted to talk to you about indium and why you chose it but as you describe all your technical details and things like that you came in so fast i wasn't able to finish the test system so i'm gonna go and finish the test system while you hop on and explain to the good folks what indium is and why you bothered me about it for like a year perfect oh it's heavy it is all right so before i talk indium let's talk about liquid metal right the stuff that sold that like thermal grizzly and stuff like that now just to recap liquid metal thermal compounds like thermal grizzlies conduct a knot are all variations of gallis stand and no that's not a country it's a mix of gallium indium and tin the base or let's say the official recipe of gallisthen is 68 gallium 22 percent indium and 10 percent tin it also stays in liquid form all the way down to negative 19 degrees celsius which is pretty crazy and probably the reason why they use it in thermometers it didn't make sense to me since each individual one of these metals have higher melting points than that but now i know that any metal alloy has a melting point that is lower than the individual pure metals quite honestly the first thing that came to my mind was aluminum foil on paper it's amazing it has incredible heat conduction at about 240 watts per meter kelvin but of course that's been tried already and according to people online it's really bad all right so after foil of course are graphite pads or thermal grizzlies carbon off but that's kind of boring everyone tried this out last year and there's no reason for me to just retest it so i chose indium so that's what i got here an indium sheet by the way you can buy it in rock form or even in tiny tiny ingots but that's nor here nor there we got sheets uh so i'm gonna put my mask back on because i think that mic is done so mike are you done with the uh test system yeah it's done so let me explain to you what i have here so first of all i installed a knock to a u12s with this fan running at 100 so that's just to make sure that no fan speed curves impact the results in any way there's also an i5 11 400 down there along with well this is a control test arctic mx4 so this is well known as one of the best thermal compounds out there but at the same time arctic sent us a whole turkey baster of a tube for it i mean it's not that bad this is what one or two the verge style applications well yeah actually that sadly but anyways as i was putting the thermal compound on a couple of questions came up and i think the first one of those was look you these things they have a syringe so you're not making direct contact with your fingers most of the time and they're not toxic to begin with yup so is this toxic is your indium toxic or i guess not that's like a cup of noodles or something yeah no indium is not toxic it is very very safe to handle uh if you want to take a look at it here it is personally i just don't want to touch the actual metal because i don't want to imprint any kind of oil from my finger onto the sheet but it is very shiny very malleable and this is indium okay so with that out of the way and i'm not going to be sort of like growing flipper grandkids which is good what about electrical conductivity do i have to worry about going a little bit further than my actual ihs on my on my cpu will it short out components yes it would short out components if two components would be shorted on an ihs as you know um you wouldn't be able to short anything just cut it so that it's slightly smaller than the ihs and you'll be perfectly fine so i guess in that case will it melt this one of the biggest things that i was wondering because you were saying that gallium i think it is has a very very low melting point this one have a high melting point yeah so gallium which is part of gala stand too would melt in the palm of your hands you know your hand is a little bit hotter so that's what 36 c well for you guys have like supposedly super cold hands yeah so for me it's like 32c but this will melt at 156.6 c that's celsius for all the canadians i don't know what it is in fahrenheit you can use a google converter as is it's pretty good because cpus don't really get that hot to get up to what 99 degrees celsius on an intel cpu if it's going to get thermal throttling well maybe on the hd hdt platform it could get a little bit higher depending on the processor that you have like the 10980xc back there that thing can put out like 125 watts without without breaking a sweat but of course it'll throttle itself back at that point jesus christ but yeah this is just a little bit higher and it's actually an advantage that it has such a low melting point um without actually turning liquid because the hotter it gets the more soft the more malleable it gets and the more it can fill those little nooks and crannies in between the cooler and the cpu ihs it's not going to be like a thermal paste but it's going to be something in between but that's exactly what makes thermal paste so good and i guess i do have a little bit of a surprise for snows because he doesn't know what else i bought here it's just because i didn't know exactly what this was or the exact application for you so we have two different thicknesses here one of them is 0.15 millimeters and the other one is what is it 0.2 that i bought yeah so 0.2 millimeters so there's two different thicknesses can you explain a little bit more wow you really splurged on that mic only the best for you well as it's a very good thing that you did here because as you might know already coolers and cpu ihs's are not perfectly mating that's why you need thermal compounds and stuff um so one of them is concave the other one's convex one of them is pitted the other one's not one of them has direct cu heat pipe thing the other one doesn't so the thicker you go with indium the more meat you have to push through those nooks and crannies so that's why personally i think that the point two millimeter version will perform slightly better than the .15 but it is to be tested okay so speaking of performance this has been running for about like 15 minutes now and the maximum cpu temperature looks to be around 73 degrees so we will use this basically as our control we're going to take off the cooler now in order to see worst case scenario what would happen if we went raw dog what happens if we would go directly with no thermal interface between the cpu and the heatsink because i'm still not convinced of this stuff i'll be honest with you that's fine so let's do that all right so we've been running this for about 15 minutes and it's actually doing quite a bit better than either of us really thought yeah i did not think it would survive no but i think okay so we're hovering at around 92 which is still 20 degrees more than having thermal compound but i think this is probably like a combination of a little bit more efficient cpu mind you it's running at 130 watts right now and it's not throttling either at 4.2 gigahertz along with a really good cooler and probably a good blending between the ihs and the bottom of the cooler yeah i think that's that's probably that's definitely a big factor in that i really i thought it would skyrocket and burn itself out no but it but it basically didn't so at least now we know what happens when there's absolutely nothing between the ihs and the cooler so what's going to happen now is we're going to take this apart i'm going to give i'm finally going to give this to snows to start cutting and we're going to actually use the indium now to see if his prediction is correct so i'm shooting for as good if not just a little bit worse than um the thermal paste all right so we've got my indium right here we've got a cpu for reference and i have here gloves now i told you before that indium is non-toxic you told me that actually yeah but basically i just want to use gloves so that i don't imprint any kind of oil on the actual cpu itself so let me put those rubber on all right so the indium is installed without too many screw-ups it was super easy you didn't slice your finger at least which is what you did the other day anyways um so i wanted to check first with the idle temperatures were because when we were running just raw we were at around 39 to 40 degrees and right now it looks like it's idling at 30 to 31 with some cores at 29 degrees so hey some cores are 28 too okay so that right away it might be better than not putting anything on the cpu so it is better it's clearly better it's about 10 degrees better we don't know if something was happening in the background with those other with those other idle results but let's hit it with some load and see what ends up happening here if you win this bet where i buy you a burger just buy me a salad okay then i get the burger yeah exactly okay i also want to mention that with without any thermal compound or any interface between the cpu and the cooler the temperature shot right up to 80 degrees before gradually going up to that 92 that we ended up seeing now here yes it's been what like 15 seconds out of our 15 minute test we're at 67 68 so from six i see cores ranging from 63 to 60 well 61 all the way up to about 68 um depending on the core yeah so what i wanted to mention though is that on our cpu on this 11 400 core number three is the hottest running core which is what we took that 92 degrees off of so that might end up screwing you we're just gonna have to see that in what like 15 minutes yeah so we'll be back in about 15 minutes and we'll see if he wins or loses that bet yep so it's been actually 30 minutes because i really wasn't believing what i was seeing and i said no there's no way we actually have to extend this test a little bit longer but right now uh so what i can see is that it's one degree no no no it's exactly the same as the mx4 application okay it was one degree cooler for about 20 minutes or the full half hour and just now it turned to 73 on core 3 which makes it on par with thermal paste well at least it's a good thermal paste and it's a single application but maybe i'm just like throwing shade at you for no reason oh this is not a single application i'm gonna take that indium and put it in another system why not let us know if you want us to try that out but anyways i i really think that this is this is actually just the tip of the iceberg because there's so many other tests that we can do but but i'm still not convinced it's just about indium i wanted to try something else what do you want to try uh so it sort of looks like indium it's made by our friends at alcan oh my god mike it's aluminum foil so here's why i think it'll fail first of all it's way thinner right yeah it's way thinner second of all i mean seriously mike the things the things that i start pulling out over here anyways so i think what we're gonna do then is i'm gonna have you sort of pull off the cooler take your indium and i'll cut this up we'll see how that performs perfect and imagine if it's on par everybody's going to be buying aluminum foil at like five dollars for 400 feet honestly i'll be i'll be impressed if it just beats raw dogging it okay well what do you think i think i think that any type of interface between the cpu and the heatsink could improve things whether or not it will or introduce the air puck as you were talking about before that's the bigger question but aluminum foil time all right well in that intermissions nose was gloating the whole time i have a really big smile under there so um i finished with my little square of aluminum foil but because of that gloating guess who can take apart the system now and that's you my friend i'm pretty excited to see that we're almost ready to pop it off all right imagine if it melted to the ihs oh that's i mean if it did then i'll be impressed by that 9 400. what is it 10 11 400 400 yeah but she's rocking at like 135 watts all right quite a bit let's see okay where'd it go of course it's there yo it's imprinted right there holy crap oh you can read the the you can read actually part of intel and what is that little trademark 2.9 gigahertz okay maybe you can tell us what exactly went on here because now i'm is it the thickness because we used the 0.2 millimeters right yeah this is the 0.2 mil and as you can see there's a shiny circle and then you can see the imprint in the middle so what i'm guessing which is probably the case is that this cooler was making a lot of contact dead center and less contact around the edge here so it's a concave ihs at that point so the ihs is concave and this is convex which is absolutely beautiful wow look at that okay but now how do you get it off of here because has it ruined my heatsink okay it hasn't ruined your heatsink you're gonna have to give me one second uh because you don't want to just peel it off because if you peel it off you're likely to just create creases on the uh indium so give me one second so this is what you need a straight razor blade um essentially why you need that just to scrape it off uh don't worry i'm gonna crush my hands i'm not gonna scratch the the heatsink so you just scrape it like this and you need a lot steadier hands than i have and at some point it's just going to kind of pop off so give it a moment so are you saying that you can reuse this stuff yes you can don't mess it up too much there you go see now it's back to being straight i should have worn gloves but then you can just apply it on another cpu push it down with the cooler and boom you got a thermal pad that works just as well as thermal paste okay so now i guess i will be putting on my aluminum foil and see how that works so we've got the aluminum system here and it's been running for about 45 minutes almost an hour and as you can see uh the results are pretty impressive the hottest core got all the way up to 83 degrees celsius okay so not as good as indium not even close to india but it bridges the gap between indium and nothing at all it's like dead center exactly so i guess that brings us sort of the conclusion and that is it's really really cool to find these niche products on the market that you can use for pretty innovative solutions and i think we really want to find more of these but there's a cost associated to it as well yeah this is pretty expensive it's 35 bucks i believe us and um as is it's a 100 ml by 100 ml sheet technically it's not that bad you could cut it up and sell it you know five dollars a pop for each of your friends that have pcs and they don't have to worry about thermal paste you don't have to either but it also has one extra advantage it's actually 800 ml by 100 mil you could put it on threadripper you could put it on an hedt system it doesn't matter you're not limited by the size of the thermal pad like with ic diamond and thermal grizzlies versions so i was actually hoping that this wouldn't do as good as it did but at the same time this has me wondering is this just the tip of the iceberg should we do more of this content where we test these type of products that you guys might not have heard of but it might come in really handy for your pc building or other needs so i guess leave us some comments below about what else you might have found out there if you want to see some more content well i'm mike with hardware canucks and i'm snows from boot sequence and now a little bit of hardware canucks or maybe a lot if some more of these things come to pass but uh anyways hope you guys enjoyed it and we'll see you guys in the next one take careall right guys so mike here with hardware canucks and i'm jumping on camera again today because i wanted to try something a little bit different now you might not actually know this or you might have known this from a couple of the other videos that i've done in the new office here in montreal is that snow's from boot sequence is actually sharing a larger office space with us and yes we're going to do a complete office tour once all of the renovations and things like that are done but he's been bugging me for a long long time about something called indium and now indium according to him could be a replacement for thermal paste for thermal pads and all sorts of things the only thing is that i wanted to test it but at the same time he doesn't know that i have it and he's actually on vacation today and i wanted to give him a call to see if i can sort of like prompt him to come in i hope he picks up give me one second i'm right here hey snows how's it going hey mike why are you calling me on my day off that's the worst thing you could have said to me but anyways listen i know that you've been asking for this for like a while but we finally got some indian sheets in and if you don't come to the office i really want to try them out so if you don't come in no no no no no shut up i'm coming i'm coming okay all right i'm already in the car i was doing some groceries i bought some fruits and stuff i'm coming right now he's trying to lose weight by the way but you know anyway so yeah get into the office and i'm going to start setting up a test system by the time by the time you get here so anyways i guess i guess with that guys uh he'll get here and here's a message from our sponsor oh there's a sponsor spot there is there is now introducing a new way to temper glass with a divider 300 series from thermaltake i love me a good triangle there's certain mystery behind it with a flexible interior layout so you can showcase your system in a particular way the divider 300 tg triangle the right way all right so snow's made it here to the office the fastest i've ever seen him do it so i wanted to introduce you guys this is knows from our boot sequence channel hello everyone you might have seen him before i think we did uh we did a video with you i had a couple of videos actually so when i was thin we did a smartphone video then after that i was still thin and we did the the pc case video and uh now we're here and kovit hit and uh that's basically why we're messed up too and uh we've put on a couple pounds both of us yeah both of us so anyways i really wanted to talk to you about indium and why you chose it but as you describe all your technical details and things like that you came in so fast i wasn't able to finish the test system so i'm gonna go and finish the test system while you hop on and explain to the good folks what indium is and why you bothered me about it for like a year perfect oh it's heavy it is all right so before i talk indium let's talk about liquid metal right the stuff that sold that like thermal grizzly and stuff like that now just to recap liquid metal thermal compounds like thermal grizzlies conduct a knot are all variations of gallis stand and no that's not a country it's a mix of gallium indium and tin the base or let's say the official recipe of gallisthen is 68 gallium 22 percent indium and 10 percent tin it also stays in liquid form all the way down to negative 19 degrees celsius which is pretty crazy and probably the reason why they use it in thermometers it didn't make sense to me since each individual one of these metals have higher melting points than that but now i know that any metal alloy has a melting point that is lower than the individual pure metals quite honestly the first thing that came to my mind was aluminum foil on paper it's amazing it has incredible heat conduction at about 240 watts per meter kelvin but of course that's been tried already and according to people online it's really bad all right so after foil of course are graphite pads or thermal grizzlies carbon off but that's kind of boring everyone tried this out last year and there's no reason for me to just retest it so i chose indium so that's what i got here an indium sheet by the way you can buy it in rock form or even in tiny tiny ingots but that's nor here nor there we got sheets uh so i'm gonna put my mask back on because i think that mic is done so mike are you done with the uh test system yeah it's done so let me explain to you what i have here so first of all i installed a knock to a u12s with this fan running at 100 so that's just to make sure that no fan speed curves impact the results in any way there's also an i5 11 400 down there along with well this is a control test arctic mx4 so this is well known as one of the best thermal compounds out there but at the same time arctic sent us a whole turkey baster of a tube for it i mean it's not that bad this is what one or two the verge style applications well yeah actually that sadly but anyways as i was putting the thermal compound on a couple of questions came up and i think the first one of those was look you these things they have a syringe so you're not making direct contact with your fingers most of the time and they're not toxic to begin with yup so is this toxic is your indium toxic or i guess not that's like a cup of noodles or something yeah no indium is not toxic it is very very safe to handle uh if you want to take a look at it here it is personally i just don't want to touch the actual metal because i don't want to imprint any kind of oil from my finger onto the sheet but it is very shiny very malleable and this is indium okay so with that out of the way and i'm not going to be sort of like growing flipper grandkids which is good what about electrical conductivity do i have to worry about going a little bit further than my actual ihs on my on my cpu will it short out components yes it would short out components if two components would be shorted on an ihs as you know um you wouldn't be able to short anything just cut it so that it's slightly smaller than the ihs and you'll be perfectly fine so i guess in that case will it melt this one of the biggest things that i was wondering because you were saying that gallium i think it is has a very very low melting point this one have a high melting point yeah so gallium which is part of gala stand too would melt in the palm of your hands you know your hand is a little bit hotter so that's what 36 c well for you guys have like supposedly super cold hands yeah so for me it's like 32c but this will melt at 156.6 c that's celsius for all the canadians i don't know what it is in fahrenheit you can use a google converter as is it's pretty good because cpus don't really get that hot to get up to what 99 degrees celsius on an intel cpu if it's going to get thermal throttling well maybe on the hd hdt platform it could get a little bit higher depending on the processor that you have like the 10980xc back there that thing can put out like 125 watts without without breaking a sweat but of course it'll throttle itself back at that point jesus christ but yeah this is just a little bit higher and it's actually an advantage that it has such a low melting point um without actually turning liquid because the hotter it gets the more soft the more malleable it gets and the more it can fill those little nooks and crannies in between the cooler and the cpu ihs it's not going to be like a thermal paste but it's going to be something in between but that's exactly what makes thermal paste so good and i guess i do have a little bit of a surprise for snows because he doesn't know what else i bought here it's just because i didn't know exactly what this was or the exact application for you so we have two different thicknesses here one of them is 0.15 millimeters and the other one is what is it 0.2 that i bought yeah so 0.2 millimeters so there's two different thicknesses can you explain a little bit more wow you really splurged on that mic only the best for you well as it's a very good thing that you did here because as you might know already coolers and cpu ihs's are not perfectly mating that's why you need thermal compounds and stuff um so one of them is concave the other one's convex one of them is pitted the other one's not one of them has direct cu heat pipe thing the other one doesn't so the thicker you go with indium the more meat you have to push through those nooks and crannies so that's why personally i think that the point two millimeter version will perform slightly better than the .15 but it is to be tested okay so speaking of performance this has been running for about like 15 minutes now and the maximum cpu temperature looks to be around 73 degrees so we will use this basically as our control we're going to take off the cooler now in order to see worst case scenario what would happen if we went raw dog what happens if we would go directly with no thermal interface between the cpu and the heatsink because i'm still not convinced of this stuff i'll be honest with you that's fine so let's do that all right so we've been running this for about 15 minutes and it's actually doing quite a bit better than either of us really thought yeah i did not think it would survive no but i think okay so we're hovering at around 92 which is still 20 degrees more than having thermal compound but i think this is probably like a combination of a little bit more efficient cpu mind you it's running at 130 watts right now and it's not throttling either at 4.2 gigahertz along with a really good cooler and probably a good blending between the ihs and the bottom of the cooler yeah i think that's that's probably that's definitely a big factor in that i really i thought it would skyrocket and burn itself out no but it but it basically didn't so at least now we know what happens when there's absolutely nothing between the ihs and the cooler so what's going to happen now is we're going to take this apart i'm going to give i'm finally going to give this to snows to start cutting and we're going to actually use the indium now to see if his prediction is correct so i'm shooting for as good if not just a little bit worse than um the thermal paste all right so we've got my indium right here we've got a cpu for reference and i have here gloves now i told you before that indium is non-toxic you told me that actually yeah but basically i just want to use gloves so that i don't imprint any kind of oil on the actual cpu itself so let me put those rubber on all right so the indium is installed without too many screw-ups it was super easy you didn't slice your finger at least which is what you did the other day anyways um so i wanted to check first with the idle temperatures were because when we were running just raw we were at around 39 to 40 degrees and right now it looks like it's idling at 30 to 31 with some cores at 29 degrees so hey some cores are 28 too okay so that right away it might be better than not putting anything on the cpu so it is better it's clearly better it's about 10 degrees better we don't know if something was happening in the background with those other with those other idle results but let's hit it with some load and see what ends up happening here if you win this bet where i buy you a burger just buy me a salad okay then i get the burger yeah exactly okay i also want to mention that with without any thermal compound or any interface between the cpu and the cooler the temperature shot right up to 80 degrees before gradually going up to that 92 that we ended up seeing now here yes it's been what like 15 seconds out of our 15 minute test we're at 67 68 so from six i see cores ranging from 63 to 60 well 61 all the way up to about 68 um depending on the core yeah so what i wanted to mention though is that on our cpu on this 11 400 core number three is the hottest running core which is what we took that 92 degrees off of so that might end up screwing you we're just gonna have to see that in what like 15 minutes yeah so we'll be back in about 15 minutes and we'll see if he wins or loses that bet yep so it's been actually 30 minutes because i really wasn't believing what i was seeing and i said no there's no way we actually have to extend this test a little bit longer but right now uh so what i can see is that it's one degree no no no it's exactly the same as the mx4 application okay it was one degree cooler for about 20 minutes or the full half hour and just now it turned to 73 on core 3 which makes it on par with thermal paste well at least it's a good thermal paste and it's a single application but maybe i'm just like throwing shade at you for no reason oh this is not a single application i'm gonna take that indium and put it in another system why not let us know if you want us to try that out but anyways i i really think that this is this is actually just the tip of the iceberg because there's so many other tests that we can do but but i'm still not convinced it's just about indium i wanted to try something else what do you want to try uh so it sort of looks like indium it's made by our friends at alcan oh my god mike it's aluminum foil so here's why i think it'll fail first of all it's way thinner right yeah it's way thinner second of all i mean seriously mike the things the things that i start pulling out over here anyways so i think what we're gonna do then is i'm gonna have you sort of pull off the cooler take your indium and i'll cut this up we'll see how that performs perfect and imagine if it's on par everybody's going to be buying aluminum foil at like five dollars for 400 feet honestly i'll be i'll be impressed if it just beats raw dogging it okay well what do you think i think i think that any type of interface between the cpu and the heatsink could improve things whether or not it will or introduce the air puck as you were talking about before that's the bigger question but aluminum foil time all right well in that intermissions nose was gloating the whole time i have a really big smile under there so um i finished with my little square of aluminum foil but because of that gloating guess who can take apart the system now and that's you my friend i'm pretty excited to see that we're almost ready to pop it off all right imagine if it melted to the ihs oh that's i mean if it did then i'll be impressed by that 9 400. what is it 10 11 400 400 yeah but she's rocking at like 135 watts all right quite a bit let's see okay where'd it go of course it's there yo it's imprinted right there holy crap oh you can read the the you can read actually part of intel and what is that little trademark 2.9 gigahertz okay maybe you can tell us what exactly went on here because now i'm is it the thickness because we used the 0.2 millimeters right yeah this is the 0.2 mil and as you can see there's a shiny circle and then you can see the imprint in the middle so what i'm guessing which is probably the case is that this cooler was making a lot of contact dead center and less contact around the edge here so it's a concave ihs at that point so the ihs is concave and this is convex which is absolutely beautiful wow look at that okay but now how do you get it off of here because has it ruined my heatsink okay it hasn't ruined your heatsink you're gonna have to give me one second uh because you don't want to just peel it off because if you peel it off you're likely to just create creases on the uh indium so give me one second so this is what you need a straight razor blade um essentially why you need that just to scrape it off uh don't worry i'm gonna crush my hands i'm not gonna scratch the the heatsink so you just scrape it like this and you need a lot steadier hands than i have and at some point it's just going to kind of pop off so give it a moment so are you saying that you can reuse this stuff yes you can don't mess it up too much there you go see now it's back to being straight i should have worn gloves but then you can just apply it on another cpu push it down with the cooler and boom you got a thermal pad that works just as well as thermal paste okay so now i guess i will be putting on my aluminum foil and see how that works so we've got the aluminum system here and it's been running for about 45 minutes almost an hour and as you can see uh the results are pretty impressive the hottest core got all the way up to 83 degrees celsius okay so not as good as indium not even close to india but it bridges the gap between indium and nothing at all it's like dead center exactly so i guess that brings us sort of the conclusion and that is it's really really cool to find these niche products on the market that you can use for pretty innovative solutions and i think we really want to find more of these but there's a cost associated to it as well yeah this is pretty expensive it's 35 bucks i believe us and um as is it's a 100 ml by 100 ml sheet technically it's not that bad you could cut it up and sell it you know five dollars a pop for each of your friends that have pcs and they don't have to worry about thermal paste you don't have to either but it also has one extra advantage it's actually 800 ml by 100 mil you could put it on threadripper you could put it on an hedt system it doesn't matter you're not limited by the size of the thermal pad like with ic diamond and thermal grizzlies versions so i was actually hoping that this wouldn't do as good as it did but at the same time this has me wondering is this just the tip of the iceberg should we do more of this content where we test these type of products that you guys might not have heard of but it might come in really handy for your pc building or other needs so i guess leave us some comments below about what else you might have found out there if you want to see some more content well i'm mike with hardware canucks and i'm snows from boot sequence and now a little bit of hardware canucks or maybe a lot if some more of these things come to pass but uh anyways hope you guys enjoyed it and we'll see you guys in the next one take care\n"