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8800GT - Huge temp drop

C

chaloux

n00b
Joined
Oct 17, 2006
Messages
56
I know many of you have 8800GTs and had bad temps. Lots of people went dual slot or aftermarket.

My PC being outside (look at my other threads) during the winter, temps weren't an issue for me. It's starting to get warmer now, so I've had to re-evaluate my 24/7 setup. I had seen several posts about re-thermal pasting the GPU and how much benefit it had, I just never had a reason to.

I've been starting to get more nvidia driver errors (presumably from overheating). I looked at my GPU temp after playing TF2 for about 30 minutes (and after two freezes), and I was hitting 79C, much higher than I had been in the winter. I did additional temp reading with ATItool.

So I took my GPU out, took the fan/heatsink off and removed all the gunk that EVGA put on there. This is weird stuff - these thermal pads have threads in them, never seen that before. I guess it's to hold the pad together and make it a pad instead of a glob.

I replaced it with the paste that came with my TRUE 120 and screwed the hs/fan back on. To my surprise, lots of the spots with pads on them don't even make contact - I guess that's why they use 1mm thick pads. Anyway, after booting up and using the same OC/fan setup as before, I am now seeing a max temp of 66C.

Yeah, I'll take a 13C drop for free.

I'd recommend doing this. It's super easy, and those pads block a lot of airflow and obviously are a bit on the thick side.
 
why would the pads block airflow? they should be on teh base under the fins
 
sounds like you mean the pads have poor thermal connectivity?
which make sense. the bigger the distance between the core and the heatsink, the poorer the thermal performance.
 
The pads are there so the RAM or FETs or whatever can make contact with the heatsink in some way. Air is a poor thermal interface material...
 
The pads are there so the RAM or FETs or whatever can make contact with the heatsink in some way. Air is a poor thermal interface material...
 
New thermal grease under GPU - 13C drop, good work.

No contact from rest of heatsink to memory and FETs - you are not going to see that reading in windows but rest assured it just went up.

RMA is in your future. (per your sig: 8800GT 512mb @ 728-1849-987)
 
Taking the pads off was a bad idea. Paste isn't thick enough to touch and make good contact.
 
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