Review: Thermal Hero Gamma Series Phase Changer & NEO Series Thermal Pads
Recently Thermal Hero reached out to me and asked if I wanted to try out their Gamma Series Phase Changer & NEO Series Thermal Pads. This was a difficult one for me to do a review on as I no longer have any PC’s handy to test products that are designed to keep the components in your PC cool. Especially if you’re overclocking them. But as I tend to, I came up with a novel way to test these pads. Thus I agreed to the review.
My test equipment was not a PC, but a self built SSD. Specifically a SABRENT 1TB SSD Rocket NVMe m.2 4.0, Gen4 PCIe M.2 1TB SSD which was in this enclosure from Amazon that does USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps transfer speeds. When I built it originally for my tech sling, I had tried to use some thermal pads to keep the drive from frying itself. But the pads never really fit into the case properly as they would come off the drive and essentially be useless. Thus my plan was to try these Thermal Hero pads to see if I could do better. Now this drive really gets hot when I use it. According to the Digital Laser Temperature Reader that my wife used for cooking, the casing when I transferred over 300 GB of files hit a temperature of 45 Celsius and was hot to the touch. Here’s what I did to address that:
On the underside of the SSD, I cut a piece of the NEO series thermal pad and placed it on the biggest chip on that side of the drive. This pad was thicker, so I used that on the underside to make sure it would fill the space between the drive and the case.
On the other side of the drive I used the Gamma Series Phase Changer Thermal Pad as these pads arevery thin and I have much less space to work with in terms of the SSD touching the enclosure.
I reassembled the drive. Erased it. And then copied the same files over to the drive. In short, I was performing the same test to see what temperature I got. This time I got 38 Celsius on the drive using my wife’s Digital Laser Temperature Reader. Not only that I noted that the heat was more evenly distributed over the entirety of the case rather than being in a couple of areas when I didn’t have these thermal pads on the drive. Also, I should note that the case was simply warm to the touch as opposed to being bordering on untouchable because of the level of heat that any sort of usage would generate.
In short, these thermal pads work as advertised. In fact, they worked better than I was expecting.
What that suggests to me is that if your use case is to use these to act as an interface between your CPU and whatever you’re using to cool it. Be it a CPU fan or a liquid cooler, these thermal pads will work really well for those purposes. Not to mention this slightly unconventional use of them. If you are looking to do things like overclock your CPU, or just simply extend the life of the components in your PC build, you can head over to Thermal Hero’s website to have a look at the products that are on offer.
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