Palit HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition a good buy?

[Wile E]

And why would you use tape? A sink with pads is better than bare chips. You're leaving the chips bare leaving them to pre-heated air. That's different from leaving system memory sticks bare, where that zone of the system isn't a hot-air environment.

It is a hot air environment when the cpu cooler blows on them. And pads are thermal tape, just cut to size.

My OC on my 8800GT ram does not change when I remove the sinks, because the factory speader has a crappy thermal interface with the chips. It's not likely that any factory solution is gonna be any better, tbh. None of my ATI cards benefitted from the factory spreaders either, for the same exact reasons.

Aftermarket, perhaps, but stock, it makes little difference.

 

[btarunr]

It is a hot air environment when the cpu cooler blows on them. And pads are thermal tape, just cut to size.

My OC on my 8800GT ram does not change when I remove the sinks, because the factory speader has a crappy thermal interface with the chips. It's not likely that any factory solution is gonna be any better, tbh. None of my ATI cards benefitted from the factory spreaders either, for the same exact reasons.

Aftermarket, perhaps, but stock, it makes little difference.

Compare the air of say a stock Intel cooler working on a 35C CPU on DDR2 chips to that of a heat-fin array working on a 60~70 C RV770 blowing on GDDR5 chips. By pads I was talking about the fibre pads NVIDIA uses for memory in its stock coolers. It offers better surface contact with the rather rough surface of a memory chip better than a tape.

 

[Wile E]

Compare the air of say a stock Intel cooler working on a 35C CPU on DDR2 chips to that of a heat-fin array working on a 60~70 C RV770 blowing on GDDR5 chips. By pads I was talking about the fibre pads NVIDIA uses for memory in its stock coolers. It offers better surface contact with the rather rough surface of a memory chip better than a tape.

I still get no difference on any of my cards. The case may be different for different vendors tho.

thinking on it more however, the vrm's tend to have the same crappy tape on their sinks, but they do benefit from the sinks/spreaders.

Perhaps on the ram it's more a function of the ram hitting it's clock limits before temperature becomes an issue on stock volts?