Thermal pads or thermal paste?

[The_LaLath]

Hello there everyone I have been doing quiet a bit of research for my next build and one of my main questions is should I use pads or paste. Im not worried about the cost and I normally use paste but I want to ask some people who have used both what do you think about each and is one alot better at transferring heat then the other?

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

It depends on the application. On a CPU IHS definitely paste, on your graphics card VRAM or VRM's pads. There was talk of some sort of resusable graphene based pads that were supposed to be pretty good maybe a couple of years ago, perhaps that's what your getting at?

Thermal Grizzly High Performance Cooling Solutions - Products

Hochwertige Wärmeleitlösungen für Computerchips

www.thermal-grizzly.com

EDIT .Just found Thermal Grizzly do pads now. Sorry I havent been keeping up obviously.

Pads performance rated below their top of the range non conductive paste Kryonaut. That means it probably performs 1-2 degrees worse on average.

 

[Oussebon]

There's another angle to the question which is that if you're asking it, it probably doesn't matter which you use.