Thermalright released a new type of thermal pad aimed at taking all the hassle out of applying thermal paste to a CPU.
Thermalright is known for its CPU heatsinks and range of thermal pastes, but its latest product is aimed at novice system builders, or anyone who doesn't like that part of the PC build where you have to put thermal paste on a CPU and hope you used enough (or not too much). To solve that problem, Thermalright has quietly introduced Heilos thermal pads.
Rather than a tube of paste, Heilos is a 0.2mm-thick pad of thermal compound that is applied to the base of the heatsink you are using. Sometimes heatsinks ship with a thermal pad pre-applied, but the quality/condition of the pads varies greatly and this can have a big impact on the performance of your CPU over its lifetime.
Thermalright clearly saw a gap in the market for offering a high-quality pad that's easy to use with any CPU/heatsink combination. It's selling two versions for use with AMD and Intel CPUs due to size differences between the two platforms.
The Heilos pads are rated at 8.5W/mK for thermal conductivity and 0.04°C cm2/W for thermal resistance. As Tom's Hardware confirms, that's "considered to be a quite decent level of performance for inexpensive pastes." In other words, these pads offer a good solution for anyone not intending to push their CPU with some serious overclocking attempts.
Thermalright has created a number of thermal pad options for helping to cool other components within a PC. There's Valor Odin and Extreme Odyssey pads available for use with RAM modules, M.2 SSDs, graphics cards, and for helping to cool the components inside the cramped casing of laptops.