7970m becomes very hot after repaste

since ic diamond becomes dry up after near 2 yrs i bought a thermal paste called "stars-700". now it is worse than the dry cake ic diamond. i could reach 1050/1634 at the same temperature with dried-up ic diamond now i have to undervolt and slow down my card. i heard liquid ultra is good but will dry up within 1 yr. any suggestion?

 

Noctua nt-h1. Or gelid GC extreme. Noctua supposed to be easier to apply but gelid get better temps. Either can be found on amazon or newegg. Or just do some quick research and see what you have available locally and see what's in your price range and expertise. There are a few good brands of grease but sometimes it comes down to price and availability. Liquid ultra I believe is good, but pricey, hard to put on and longevity isn't as good as the two I mentioned. Shin etsu is also good but I dont know if that can be found anymore.

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Is repasting every two years that bad even? It should last longer than that though.

 

Not necessarily if you run it hard. I've never tried or believed any comments on pastes lasting years. I try to repaste every 6mos to a year. My last paste was close to a year and my max temps dropped close to 10* c. Wish I remember what I used last.

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I've been fine myself and I have not re pasted in some time now and I always run my stuff hard

 

The Gelid GC-Extreme has done great in benches. The Coollaboratory Liquid Pro and Liquid Ultra are topping Tom's tests, but only by a very small margin over the Gelid and ICD compounds.

How long either lasts is subjective.

 

But the test is for desktop heatsinks and desktop pressures, low pressure heatsinks will behave very differently.

 

just bought gc-extreme. i can say it is better than ic diamond come with sager i ordered.

 

Nothing is quite as good as a user paste job though

 

For laptops it doesn't get any better than Liquid Ultra, mainly due to the lack of heat spreader so the only bottleneck is the die-heatsink interface.

 

Gelid is okay, but often running of benchmark make temperatures go up with time(often re-applying).
MX-2 is a little bit worst with level of temps comparing to gelid.
IC Diamond makes scratches on core.
Coollaboratory by often warm-up/heating is just eating the copper part of heatsink especially at high temperatures(small dots).

I use gelid and also mx-2, at least once a month I m changing thermal conductive paste. If it is about the "way of applying" for me mx-2 was much easier than gelid.
And of course even the best paste will not help if you apply it wrong way.(the entire core must be covered)

 

Liquid Ultra bonds to the copper heatsink yes, but it doesn't eat it. It will eat aluminum though.

 

Yes aluminum not copper, sorry mess in my head.

 

I've repasted my 7970m after I got my unit from Xotic pc.

Repasted again yesterday after more than a year of hard gaming and it ran hotter. Got to about 78c running GW2 and BF3. Repasted again today and ran the same programs. Highest was 66c on GW2 and 63c on BF3.

I've use Prolimatech Pk1 for all pasting jobs. Maybe just need a repaste and re-seat on your end.

 

wow that's very low temp on your 7970M.
What's your room/ambient temp?

 

A lot depends also from graphic settings. BF4 on 7970m make also about 66 degrees when running on mid settings.

 

I tried repasting my 7970m but got around 85c with bf4 high. I used prolimatech pk2. How did you guys get it below 70c?

Here is a foto. I watched on youtube that a line was better than dot.



Would like to know whats the best method to reapply paste.

 

Confession, I have only repasted one laptop in my life and that was my alienware 17 after I found the 6970m to be running hot. It helped only slightly. I have a feeling I am going to +1 that soon with this dual 880m alienware.

 

My GPU went to 91c after playing Witcher 2 on high settings.
The GPU usage was at 99% constant.

 

the temp is also highly affected by the solder quality of the heatsink.

 

All thermal paste has curing time. Artic silver 5 has a curing time of 100 hrs. If your temperature is running higher after repaste, my guess is that the original thermal paste was perfectly fine. You probably have to wait after the curing period before you see a drop in temperature.

 

The temperature was a bit worse before.
Can you take a look at the picture I posted.
Is that the right way/amount of paste or should it be less?

 

Method looks ok, does not need to be quite so long

 

It almost appears to be too much (line licks a bit thick). Can you post a photo of the spread?