DIY Diamond Thermal Compound- Mops the floor with AS5

Interesting, fairly easy, and cheap DIY project for the intrepid hardware modifiers among you:

http://inventgeek.com/Projects/DiamondGrease/overview.aspx

Basically, diamonds have 2 to 5 times the thermal conductivity of silver, so a thermal compound containing this has the potential for vast improvements, and their temps show it:

 

Or you can just get a similar product from IC or JetArt for a fraction of the cost. Honestly, for 99% of the people, any thermal compound that is properly applied will do the trick. I honestly doubt there is that much difference and would wait to see until more test results come out since 1 test result is meaningless in any scientific study.

 

They sell this stuff premade now.
Cool nonetheless.

 

So was the ambient temperature the same?

There is no way that a thermal paste is going to make nearly 19C off of the load temperature. The results were probably skewed by differences in ambient temperature

K-TRON

 

19°C less just by using a different thermal paste. That seems impossible...

 

ICD7 averages 5-9C cooler on a couple of Acers, an AW and some Thinkpads for me, but no 19 degrees.

 

especially at full load...5-9 degrees seems to be more accurate/plausible and is already a big drop in my opinion...I mean it's just thermal paste.

 

19C is quite impossible...

 

i would give ICD7 a try though. I'm curious about this stuff ;-)

 

=> http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=39&threadid=2164479

People are getting about 5° colder, that's not so bad =)

 

Please note that the original post is NOT about ICD7, but about a homemade thermal compound.

Also, I don't think anyone is arguing 4-5C, the question is over the 15 or so in that article.

 

Well he did say he is using an overclocked Pentium D http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL88S which could be running something like 150W at full load so it would only need a 0.1C/W change in TIM to make a 15C difference. The equivalent on say a standard notebook with P8??? would be something like ~2.5C difference at full load.

 

Cool idea, I like DIY but in this case i would go with ICD7 as its going to be almost the same and all the work is done for you.

My main concern really is that DIY while showing good temps has no long term testing, that grease may dry out or crack causing premature failure of the compound, ICD7 has undergone numerous stress testings and is proven to be long lasting, that alone is the main reason I would pass on DIY.

 

I agree with vicious just get the pre-made ICD 7 24 carrat. It is very good! Just be careful when removing your heatsink after however as it sticks very strongly to it and the core.

 

Back when I had the C90S I used the metal pads the ones that melt when heated, those worked great but had the same problem (probably worse) that it was very hard to remove, you pretty much had to run a cpu benchmark or something to heat it up just before you tried to remove the heatsink, that same trick will probably help take off the heatsink with ICD7/24.

I had some stock TIM stuck on so bad one time when I was building a desktop (was a P4 or my AMD Opteron Desktop) that no matter what I tried the heatsink didnt come off, I had to pull hard and it finally poped off, I lookked down at my mobo to take out the cpu and it was GONE!!! I almost had a heart attack, I looked at the bottom of my heatsink and saw the cpu was still attached. It actually ripped the cpu out of the mobo when it was locked in place, much to my supprise the cpu and motherboard both lived. I was really scared because I had broke a brand new P4 cpu once because a single pin got bent during install somehow (got I hate myself for buying that P4 it was brand new and had the Hyper Threading and I thought it was going to be a big upgrade over my old cpu and it was not, and it didnt even last that long before AMD beat it with a much better cpu for a lower price.)

 

Lol I put a new heatsink on my p4 2.4ghz northwood cpu and bent a few pins on it. Using a pair of tweezers I managed to straighten them out again however and it worked fine again, Thank god

 

Dont believe this bull crap people....and dont waste your money.