Innovation Cooling provided independent users in the Overclockers.com Forum with a tube of IC Diamond 7 Carat Thermal Compound to conduct a comparison test against their current thermal compound (user results can be viewed at Anandtech, Hardware Logic, Xtremesystems, AMDZone, and OCForums.)
A single user test on its own is anecdotal in nature and the technical minutia can be argued pro and con for each point. To bring the test results into focus, the forum member results were compiled by one of the members ( Omsion ) and the above charts were created.
A large enough sample will mitigate testing errors. For example, one user may have a good mount, another not so good; with a large enough sample, these errors average out. In this case, we can say that on average using IC Diamond Thermal Compound will result in a 3ºC improvement compared to other compounds in our test sample at a 95% confidence interval.
Users experiencing improvements comment favorably:
- "8ºC drop at load, this is incredible."
- "I have a 7ºC drop in temps using this stuff. Fantastic!!!"
- "I must say from what I've seen so far I'm sold and this stuff is easier to clean up than normal silver based thermal paste."
- "Pretty nice gain! Not much change at idle but who cares, saving 3.1C at load is nice considering that most of us, including myself, have spent hundreds over the years to accomplish less."
- "Overall temp drop from ASC to IC7 was pretty impressive. I didn't expect extremely high temps considering my CPU isn't exactly highly overclocked. It's even more impressive considering that I'm not producing that much heat and yet I'm still able to see a difference in temps."
Users experienced an average 3ºC improvement with IC Diamond Thermal Compound compared to other thermal compounds. Comparison testing is ongoing and will be expanded as more user results become available.