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.
Bad News For Elon Musk… Bluesky Has New Users Signing Up At A Massive Rate
Posted in Commentary with tags Bluesky on September 6, 2024 by itnerdI am starting to think that we’re at a tipping point where Elon Musk’s antics have finally driven people to go someplace else other than Twitter for their social media fix. I say that because Tech Crunch is reporting the following:
Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil, having now added more than 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.
As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the No. 1 app in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.
In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands.
Bluesky’s newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.
Now these are figures that are maybe a week old. But this post from Bluesky from two days ago seems to validate that this is not just a temporary blip:
If you’re Elon Musk, that has to freak you out. I am pretty sure that he was hoping that Brazilians would somehow use other means to continue to use Twitter even though it was banned in the country. But that appears not to be the case. On top of that, it also appears that people outside of Brazil are giving Bluesky a try. None of this is good news for Elon. And what’s likely going to worse news is that advertisers who aren’t spending their advertising budgets on Twitter, are likely going to look to spend their dollars, Pounds, or Euros on Bluesky. Which is even worse news for Elon.
On a personal note, I have noted that I am getting more engagement from Bluesky in the form of people reading my posts which I cross post onto the platform, as well as an uptick of people following my Bluesky account (which is @theitnerd.bsky.social if you’re not already a follower). Thus adding another data point to the observation that this isn’t some sort of temporary blip.
I suspect that Elon may be reconsidering some of his life choices right now as this isn’t going in the right direction for him.
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