Help me choose right thermal pads / solution for GE75 9SF Raider

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maksimo.84

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Hello, forum

I would like to find out how thick thermal pads should be to cover VRM section. I've read that I need to replace thermal grease (white and sticky stuff on VRMs) with thermal pads to get better temperature results. I have a picture here
index.php

There is that white stuff. Also there are Pink thermal pads in the top right corner but they don;t seem to be touching the heat spreader that sits on top of them. There is no print on them.
Please let me know how thick should the pads be in order to replace white thermal grease? Also tell me how thick should be the pink pads? Should that help with VRM temperatures?
Not even sure why MSI didn't go with pads instead of white grease straight away...

Also I'm planning to use liquid metal on CPU + GPU, but I'm not sure how often should I reapply it afterwards? Some say once every 2-3 years. What you, guys, think? I would also appreciate if some1 will share his experience with it. Normal paste vs Liquid Metal experience may be? I've done some research but there are still questions. Any help would be much appreciated!
 
did you solve this? I have a GL63 with the same sort of grease on the VRMs? Cant find any info on thickness on pads instead of the grease?
Thank you
 
garphamma157b02e2 said:
did you solve this? I have a GL63 with the same sort of grease on the VRMs? Cant find any info on thickness on pads instead of the grease?
Thank you
Click to expand...
On GL63-9SDK GTX 1660Ti I used .05 mm Thermaliright Odysey. On CPU is 1 mm. Works well with CLU LM.
Easiest way to remove grease is roll into balls with wooden toothpick and then pick them off as ISO or Acetone just make a mess.
 
I have tried few different solutions on different laptops: most relevant would be GE73 Raider and GP76 Leopard, because of the high-powered CPUs and GPUs and a lot of heat they generate. I also had a GT72s 6qe, but due to the bigger case and bigger/better cooling system, it runs much cooler than the other two. Basically, gaming laptops tend to run really hot and keeping them in check is difficult.

At first I used Arctic Cooling MX4 I had laying around for few years and some no-name pads, but just about a month after fresh application, temps were too high again.

Next thing I did was liquid metal Thermalgrizzly conductonaut on my GE73 Raider. That turned out a disaster in my case. After some extensive research, the liquid metal is kind of a gamble for every laptop - it all depends on the condition and material of the heatsink. Personally, I do not recommend using liquid metal because
laptop heatsinks are low-pressure systems and the contact to the chip surface is often not perfectly even - the "must be" condition for liquid metal! Another reason is liquid metal "eating" on the heatsink material - you should definitely NOT use it with any alluminium made heatsink! Even my copper made heatsink was "attacked" by liquid metal after only one week of usage and I read that it can render the heatsink unusable in the long run. Anyway, since my heatsink wasn't perfectly aligned to the CPU and GPU, liquid metal was a miss for me.

Next I tried "Kryonaut" and "Kryonaut extreme" from Thermalgrizzly, on pair with TG's "Minus pad 8". These finally gave me good results. But after a month or two the temperatures began to rise again, albeit not as quickly as with the old MX4 paste. Kryonaut, and especially "extreme" version, are very good and very expensive compounds, but unfortunately they are designed to continuously work at the temperatures not higher than 80 degrees C. The GE73 and GP76 are extremely slim laptops with very thin heatsinks and tight space inside the case, running extremely powerful components (I7-8750H + GTX1070 and I7-10750H + RTX3070). While
gaming or under performance stress, the temps are usually higher than 80C and thus even "Kryonaut extreme" began to dry out with time as well, unfortunately, resulting in the rise of temperature - kinda closed circle of fault.. The "Minus pad8" pads also partially dried out - the parts closest to the most hot points, but it holds much better, than no-name thermal pads - I can recommend "Minus pad8".
It is worth mentioning, that in the cooler GT72s laptop, where temperatures were just around 80C at most, the "regular" Kryonaut and no-name pads worked fine for much longer period of time without or with only slight signs of deterioration. So it greatly depends on how "cool" your laptop initially runs.

Lastly I tried "Hydronaut". Although it is considered a cheaper (thus inferior?) thermal compound, it was recommended for use with laptops due to it's high viscosity - thus higher sustainability under high temperatures. And I have to say, so far it gave me the best results on those super hot-running laptops. And for GP76 I decided to opt out from using thermal pads altogether and try "Phobya NanoGrease Extreme" compound for cooling of VRAM and other chips around CPU/GPU instead. It is also very thick and viscose paste, and so far it works at least as good as "Minus pad8" pads on GE73. (Just had to make sure to apply it richly.) Of course, time will tell, but for now I am satisfied with the results. Another worthy mention is that I also use ThrottleStop to undervolt both GE73 and GP76, to ensure the temperatures stay under 95C and thus prevent thermal throttling, which also means more turbo time = more performance.

As an afterword, I personally came to a conclusion, that there is only so much you can do to lower temperatures on a high-power gaming laptop in a long term. You will have to repaste it reguarly - you can only somewhat extend the periods between these maintainances. Liquid metal would be a solution, but it's such a gamble on a laptop - I will not use it again. I hope it helped you!
 
P.S. Forgot to mention the "K5-Pro" thermal compound by "ComputerSystems". It is used by some manufacturers as a substitute for thermal pads and it seemed like it was used from factory on my GP76. You could consider using it as alternative to the more expensive "Phobya NanoGrease". I only tested K5 briefly on GT72s and it was also as good as thermal pads - probably gonna last longer too!
 
Thank you, Lookertoo. I also never said, the K5 was the best solution - it's still as good as the no-name thermal pads from ebay, though. :) That's why I use TG's Minus pad8 thermal pads or Phobya Nano as alternative.
 
I didnt say K5 was the best either friend, I said KS Style. STYLE meaning TYPE.
Everyones got their own flavor. Mine are the Thermalright Odyssey 12mwk pads. The BULK manufacturers of the pads have online catalogues of their products.There you can find a list including thermal range, sizes, thickness and even colors. Be aware that all the different names the pads are sold under, Phobiya Nano-Thermalright, Blah! Blah! are simply names dreamed up by Re Packagers and sold under whatever fancy name they figure you the consumer will be hooked on. I mean Phobya Nano. Holy Crap Batman, get me some of that! Truth is you should really research to see what you are getting.
Take 5 minutes and google "thermal padding Manufacturers". Look around and you will find LOTS of OPTIONS. Bergquist has the Softest Pads.Find a company and then order a 50 foot roll for $100 offer them $50 and they will come back with $80.:D
Take that and cut it up into 4 x 8 inch pieces, put it in cheap printed packages and charge 20-$30 a chunk with a little marketing hype. When making choices on pads you pretty well have to rely on their stated thermal ratings, hardness (shore) etc. There is only one sure way to determine pad thickness. Dry measure it with modeling clay and measure compressed height. I follow 2 pieces of advise from the manufacturers. Make a firm contact only, compressing thermal pads reduces their ability to transfer heat and when the gap is questionable, increase padding .05 at a time until firm contact is obtained. Read Thermalright here: they for one sell their own brand from AMG.

top 5 thermal pad products of thermal pad manufacturer - Dongguan AMG Electronic Products Co., Ltd

The thermal pad manufacturer suggests that this silicon thermal pad GPU is metal-free, so it is not conductive and safe to use. It will not cause any short circuit in the cpu.
www.amgthermal.com www.amgthermal.com
 
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Yes, I agree. But those Henkel's are not accessable for a normal end-user like me - it is for brand-resellers. But anyway, in the end, everyone has his favorites and what really matters, are the results, you might agree. :) Thermal Grizzly's Pads were avaiable and affordable to me, and they have the best quality among these availabe to me. And as for Phobya, it's not a pad, but a thermal gel/grease, if you want. Imho, the thick grease will not dry out as quickly as a pad, so I decided to give it a try. It works until now.

Have a nice day!
 
There ya go.The pads are proven better in all tests i have seen. I have never seen or heard, in 20 years,of silicon pads drying out, mainly because pads are never used in an application where temperatures are high enough. I have never run the snot out of my machines running stupid "Destructive" stress testing so thats probably why. The Gorilla Snot is cost effective for the manufacturers and its great for the Tube Squeezing crowd who dont have the time to sit down and cut individual pads. But then again maybe they cast individual pads on the Coldplate to save weight,or not!
Did you not see the place where you can ask Henkel for a sample?? I just ask for what I need.
 
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Yep! Definitely a gap. Hard to judge what the gap is tho from the clip. Remember that the memory and controller chips contact surface sits above the PCB. Sometimes in a constrained position such as this photo was taken, an illusion of a space across the whole surface will appear caused by light reflection.The only way to tell for sure is remove the sink and check for a contact imprint on the thermal pad you use "BUT". USE THERMAL PAD for this! Pads work best with firm fit. They loose effectiveness if compressed to much.
 
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The board the chip sits on appears to be bowed down in the center. I would cut a block of foam, rubber etc and shim the center of the board up so it doesnt bow.
In the video it looks like there are allready two spacers in there. Shim them up??
 
roma10140279 said:
I have tried few different solutions on different laptops: most relevant would be GE73 Raider and GP76 Leopard, because of the high-powered CPUs and GPUs and a lot of heat they generate. I also had a GT72s 6qe, but due to the bigger case and bigger/better cooling system, it runs much cooler than the other two. Basically, gaming laptops tend to run really hot and keeping them in check is difficult.

At first I used Arctic Cooling MX4 I had laying around for few years and some no-name pads, but just about a month after fresh application, temps were too high again.

Next thing I did was liquid metal Thermalgrizzly conductonaut on my GE73 Raider. That turned out a disaster in my case. After some extensive research, the liquid metal is kind of a gamble for every laptop - it all depends on the condition and material of the heatsink. Personally, I do not recommend using liquid metal because
laptop heatsinks are low-pressure systems and the contact to the chip surface is often not perfectly even - the "must be" condition for liquid metal! Another reason is liquid metal "eating" on the heatsink material - you should definitely NOT use it with any alluminium made heatsink! Even my copper made heatsink was "attacked" by liquid metal after only one week of usage and I read that it can render the heatsink unusable in the long run. Anyway, since my heatsink wasn't perfectly aligned to the CPU and GPU, liquid metal was a miss for me.

Next I tried "Kryonaut" and "Kryonaut extreme" from Thermalgrizzly, on pair with TG's "Minus pad 8". These finally gave me good results. But after a month or two the temperatures began to rise again, albeit not as quickly as with the old MX4 paste. Kryonaut, and especially "extreme" version, are very good and very expensive compounds, but unfortunately they are designed to continuously work at the temperatures not higher than 80 degrees C. The GE73 and GP76 are extremely slim laptops with very thin heatsinks and tight space inside the case, running extremely powerful components (I7-8750H + GTX1070 and I7-10750H + RTX3070). While
gaming or under performance stress, the temps are usually higher than 80C and thus even "Kryonaut extreme" began to dry out with time as well, unfortunately, resulting in the rise of temperature - kinda closed circle of fault.. The "Minus pad8" pads also partially dried out - the parts closest to the most hot points, but it holds much better, than no-name thermal pads - I can recommend "Minus pad8".
It is worth mentioning, that in the cooler GT72s laptop, where temperatures were just around 80C at most, the "regular" Kryonaut and no-name pads worked fine for much longer period of time without or with only slight signs of deterioration. So it greatly depends on how "cool" your laptop initially runs.

Lastly I tried "Hydronaut". Although it is considered a cheaper (thus inferior?) thermal compound, it was recommended for use with laptops due to it's high viscosity - thus higher sustainability under high temperatures. And I have to say, so far it gave me the best results on those super hot-running laptops. And for GP76 I decided to opt out from using thermal pads altogether and try "Phobya NanoGrease Extreme" compound for cooling of VRAM and other chips around CPU/GPU instead. It is also very thick and viscose paste, and so far it works at least as good as "Minus pad8" pads on GE73. (Just had to make sure to apply it richly.) Of course, time will tell, but for now I am satisfied with the results. Another worthy mention is that I also use ThrottleStop to undervolt both GE73 and GP76, to ensure the temperatures stay under 95C and thus prevent thermal throttling, which also means more turbo time = more performance.

As an afterword, I personally came to a conclusion, that there is only so much you can do to lower temperatures on a high-power gaming laptop in a long term. You will have to repaste it reguarly - you can only somewhat extend the periods between these maintainances. Liquid metal would be a solution, but it's such a gamble on a laptop - I will not use it again. I hope it helped you!
Click to expand...
Thats a lot of words for no solutions or answering the OP.
 
roma10140279 said:
P.S. Forgot to mention the "K5-Pro" thermal compound by "ComputerSystems". It is used by some manufacturers as a substitute for thermal pads and it seemed like it was used from factory on my GP76. You could consider using it as alternative to the more expensive "Phobya NanoGrease". I only tested K5 briefly on GT72s and it was also as good as thermal pads - probably gonna last longer too!
Click to expand...
There are none of the "gorilla Snot" pastes that come close to quality pads like Thermalrite Odysesy 12 m/wk >Period.
I just purchased some "Generic" bulk padding and it is rated at 17 m/wk. Semi sticky shape forming and Heavy like lead which means High Silicon content.
"Snot" is for lazy people who find working their lips is less demanding than sitting down with a pair of scissors and doing things right. Dont have the time to pull a heatsink and do dry measurements with modeling clay to determine thickness. Its "Good enough" for the factories because it will do the job and on a run of 3 million machines will save them a sxxtload of $$$$$.. Wise up! 7 m/wk vs 17 m/wk ??? Thats the equivalent of comparing 7 m/wk Paste to 150 m/wk Liquid metal on your CPU-GPU.
Cheers!
edit: I must be grumpy cause I already answered this before. I will leave it up anyway. If you google Thermal Material Suppliers you can buy a 20 foot roll, chop it up and go into business. Everyones in on it! Cheap to print up the packaging.

https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesal...al+Pad+15w/mk&spm=a2g0o.productlist.1000002.0
 
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