replaced thermal paste (GPU)....wow

i have a 6970 used to run max oc when i first got it then one day stopped. only really been playing D3 for a while. got AC4 today, found a stock i was sitting @ 95c! while playing with fan quite loud. Ripped off the shroud, the thermal paste had turned rock hard, took like a hour with isopropanol to get if off the heatsink/gpu. put on some nh-h1 now ~65 and not audible of the combined sound of all the equipment in my study!

true story bro.....
 
Something similar happened with my old A64 that I gave to my brother a couple of years back. The heatsinks for those cpu's were held in place by only 2 clips. Somehow one of the clips got loose so over 50% of the heatsink wasn't even touching the cpu. The paste turned all black and hard.

The system was surprisingly stable though for having so little cooling.
 
The TIM was solid because AMD frequently uses phase change TIM (wax like). They've used it on lots of their high end GPUs but have recommended it all the way back to the original Athlon. It liquefies when heated. They often brag about the virtues of it. I doubt it was the cause of high temps.

Though yes, cheap pastes can dry up. They essentially become a crusty thermal insulator. Pastes also don't have infinite lifetimes in general and do degrade in various ways.
 
When I still used my 4850 it used to get to 120C under furmark and throttle and idled at 70C so I finally took the hsf off and removed the massive amount of dust in it and redid the thermal paste and it idled at like 40C with furmark load temp of 70C, quite an improvement. I really only did it because the fan would spin up so much. I had to use it for a bit when I flashed my 7850 to the wrong bios and was surprised it was louder than my 7850 during gaming, since I find the 7850 to be borderline loud.
 
there's also website that do benchmark varioous paste, including toothpaste, mayonaise, etc:D

I once used a drop of olive oil between the CPU (An Athlon64-X2) and HSF because the arctic silver I had ordered with the CPU hadn't arrived yet and I had no synthetic oil. When I finally got the arctic silver paste, the CPU ran 1-2 degree C warmer under load than with the oil.

I'm guessing the oil was better because it had much lower viscosity and resulted in a thinner film between the die and HSF.

Cheers
 
My old Radeonb 4670 went to 110C once while playing that cellshaded Prince of Persia game, but thankfully after few minutes of testing I managed to spot that cooler was not spinning. I just removed and returned entire GPU into PCIE slot, and that fixed the problem.
 
I think I might either need to replace thermal paste on my new kaveri or just buy a new hsf. Basically the hdmi on the mainboard broke, thus I go to the local biostar distributor to have it replaced. Anyway, the guy just remove the hsf, moved the cpu to the new mb, and reattach the hsf without paying any attention to the thermal paste.
Anyway, I'm a bit annoyed with Kaveri because using the somewhat official amd overdrive, it only displayed thermal margin. I used several different tools to check the cpu temp and it wasn't consistent. I'm starting to doubt whether the bios reading is correct or not (70 when idle and the hsf fan spinning full tilt? Wtf!)... Either that or the hsf is making a very lousy contact to the cpu. But the thermal margin is okay, about 40 at idle. I don't know what to believe. I think amd overdrive thermal margin is correct, but why thermal margin?
 
I'm guessing the oil was better because it had much lower viscosity and resulted in a thinner film between the die and HSF.
You wouldn't want olive oil on your CPU once the oil goes rancid...! :p
 
Arctic Silver has a break in period. Mount pressure, fan vibration and thermal cycles thin it out and drop the chip a couple more degrees. Most pastes work like that AFAIK.

Thermal paste performance varies by little though yes. A little web research will show that. The point of the stuff is to get air out of the metal to metal interface. Air is bad. Almost anything is better.
 
I do a yearly spring cleaning , although I do it in October so I guess its a fall cleaning lol. I redo all the paste at the time of the cleaning as the heat goes on in the house at that point
 
Back
Top