Zalman Super Grease on HD4850 GPU

This may be a cheap solution to cool the HD4850 just a little to improve performance.

I set out to Fry's Electronics on Saturday in search of some Tupiq TX2 thermal paste. I didn't find any. I did find a Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU cooler on sale that came with a bottle of Zalman Thermal Grease so I got it. What a beautiful all copper CPU cooler, real work of art.

Ok so I took apart my PowerColor HD4850 and found the GPU to be covered with some kind of AS5 type of looking Thermal Paste. It was covered with it. Had it smeared all over the place. Not sure what brand it was. So I cleaned it all off. I was going to put the thermal grease on vRAM and any other parts that made contact with heat sink but everthing else made contact with the heat sink with a nice white looking piece of thermal tape. So i didn't mess with that.

Put the card together and swapped CPU coolers from a Cooler Master TX2 to the Zalman Zalman CNPS9700 LED. Replaced Antec Formula 5 thermal paste with the Zalman Super Thermal Grease.

Added LG DVD burner drive 20x that I got from Newegg very cheap and fired put it all together. Fired up the machine a few times till my MB excepted the LG optical drive and performed a Crysis benchmark test. 3 loops took the screen shots at the highest GPU Load on the last loop.


I performed this same test before I added the Zalman thermal paste and cooler and after the "upgrade".


Before:








Before Test Results:






With the Zalman Super Grease on HD4850 GPU and CPU with the beautiful Zalman CPU cooler:




After test Results:







Looks like the Zalman cooler did good job of cooling down my E8400.

The Zalman Super Thermal Grease appears to have helped lower the HD4850 temps just a little too.

Maby after the grease settles in it will cool down some more.