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Testing the NVIDIA GTX 970 with IC DIAMOND

Actual application of the paste (amount & consistency spread over the GPU) are probably more important than the TIM used. Some of my GPU's have owned had shockingly bad retail paste applications. I think that it was my GTX580 where only 3/4 of core had paste on it, the remainder cooled by bare metal. I couldn't understand why it ran hotter than my 480 before I popped the cooler off. At least the paste on the above card seems to have been spread pretty evenly.
 
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Darker, happens with some other pastes too, personally not anal about the backside of a cooler-as long as it completely removes from the core in case of warranty purpose-that's all I'm concerned with.

Pros-Cost, works really, really well dropping the temps considerably lower than other pastes.

Cons-Harder to apply/remove, my tube increased viscosity and hardened to the extent it was unusable over the space of a few months-despite the cap firmly replaced and stored in the same container as other pastes.

Hey there, I am curious about this. Would you like me to send you another small tube, see what happens?

regards

Frosty
 
If you have a tube floating around spare I am happy to try it on my MSI Gaming GTX 780. At the moment it is using MX-4, it'd be nice to compare because my MX-4 is almost out so I need a new tube of something very soon.
Can throw it on my CPU too, at the moment it is using the stock paste that came with my H105.
 
I love IC Diamond but it did scratch my 780 Ti GPU with the reference heatsink and 980 GPU with Gigabyte G1 heatsink. These aren't deep scratches just light but very noticeable.

Will have to get some more as my tube is almost at the end. Currently using liquid pro and it's working great, no scratches and easy to remove with a 70% alcohol pad (I use the pre-injection ones), you would never know it was there.

I have found IC Diamond is better than MX4 by a few degrees on my CPU and GPU.
 
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I'd like to try this on my msi 970, already checked with msi that removing the cooler doesn't void warranty :)

Good man as I have the same card:) good to know as the standard paste they put in it is quite worrying, as you will soon find out.

PM trust me your addy and ill get some sent out.

regards

frosty
 
send me a trust request please buddy!

Btw how long has the MX4 been on your GPU?

I have sent you a trust message :)

My MX4 has been on for approx 1 month.
Prior to that my GPU was in my water loop (only just downsized to mATX), I was using MX4 with all my watercooling.

In fact, I used Arctic Silver 5 up until I ran out, I can't remember when that was, then started using MX4.
If IC Diamond proves to be better, then I guess that'll be the new one to keep a hold of :)
 
Just got my hands on a 780ti and also delidded my 3770k.
I currently have mx4 but would like to give this a try on both. I'm going to be using clp between the cpu die and ihs, but will use it diamond for gpu core and cpu ihs. Both will also be watercooled :)
 
Got some ic diomand already .., what's Galaxs stance on cooler removal ? I've never bothered befor but that's a large enough delta to be worth it .., I've spend a bonb in the past to lower GPU temps
 
I took part in the original giveaway test with IC Diamond and Perhelion on here a couple of years ago and even back then there were loads of complaints of it scratching surfaces. Under my blocks I had little to no improvement in temps (1 degree improvement on the cpu and zero on the gpu) over MX-2 and Perhelion was worse performing. There were several people in that test that had similar experiences.

As for the comparison in the gpu test between MSI's stock paste and IC Diamond you would get a improvement in temps from any other decent tim as well.
 
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