Always put new TIM on your video cards!

H

[H]jimmy

Weaksauce
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Aug 26, 2010
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Just wanted to relate an experience.

Today I was putting a MSI gtx 460 in a customers new gaming pc. I pulled it out of the box and started overclocking it. Straight out of the box it was idling at about 40 degrees C. If I attempted OCCT or Furmark it would hit 80 degrees relatively quickly. This is with one of the best cooling designs around for a 460.

So I removed the heatsink and cleared off all the crappy tim that nvidia uses, and replaced it with Shin-Etsu x23. I added 3 tiny heatsinks on the VRM's and installed it again.

Now it is idling at 27 degrees C, and has no problem doing 850/1000 at 1.000mv. Max temp in OCCT is now 68 degrees C.

Moral of the story always check to make sure your video card has a nice thin coat of TIM and is properly mounted. Whoever manufacturers these things puts way too much on and its poor quality.
 
Honestly...the chances are pretty small of that happening. I'm not worrying about it and neither are my SLI GTX470's. Good thing you caught it, but it really was nothing more then a bad contact of TIM, probably.
 
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I do it anyways, helps keep the card cooler, better oc, longer life...worth it everytime.
 
It's improved the temps of every card I have done it to. Which is about 50 cards over this year. Some it improves a little, some a lot.
 
Interesting, but I'm always afraid to remove video card heatsinks.
I've seen a lot of horror stories. I remember putting a ThermalRight HR-03 on my 8800 some years ago and it was a massive pain in the ass.
 
I always do it also. My ATI HD4850 hit 80C when I first got it. First thing I did was replace the TIM with Arctic Ceramique. Temps were below 70C and that was before I even tweaked the fan profile.
 
I always do this with new cards no matter what. I also use Shin-Etsu x23 its great stuff.
 
jbz7890 said:
Doesn't this void the warranty?
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Maybe for some cards.
Others, yes, but how would they know? Some cards have no stickers or anything, just a few screws. So there's no way for them to tell. I guess they could take off the heatsink and check the paste, but still that's not a certain method.

Also, for warranty voiding discussion, please see oftForum. :p
 
It can with notebooks, if they have the little warranty sticker covering the screw (typically on cpus, maybe discrete graphics).

I've never seen them on a desktop card though. Just be careful not to damage anything and they'll never know =p
 
Not really good advice.

I remember when first gen Fermi cards came out, people took them apart and laughed at those silly Taiwanese/Chinese workers who slabbed on so much TIM...then in turned out that it didn't make a damn difference how you applied it or how much you applied, except that if you tried to apply just a single drop your temps would become horrible.

I know this firsthand because I applied OCZ Freeze or Ceramique on three different 470s, and the results were no better than what I started out with.
 
Matrices said:
Not really good advice.

I remember when first gen Fermi cards came out, people took them apart and laughed at those silly Taiwanese/Chinese workers who slabbed on so much TIM...then in turned out that it didn't make a damn difference how you applied it or how much you applied, except that if you tried to apply just a single drop your temps would become horrible.

I know this firsthand because I applied OCZ Freeze or Ceramique on three different 470s, and the results were no better than what I started out with.
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There's actually a TON of people who dropped their temps by re-applying TIM to their cards. I'm one of them. There's a GIANT thread on the EVGA forums about it as well.
 
Only thing I have that I haven't voided the warranty on is the hard drives :p

This is good advice for any overclocker, hardly [H] though
 
I know with Nvidia at least, from dealing with my 8800 GTXs and it sounds similar from what another poster above is saying about Fermi cards, that they use a really thick layer of TIM that's sort of like putty. This is odd stuff, and doesn't seem to work quite like most TIM. What's more, the 8800s had mesh thermal transfer pads on the RAM, and if you tried to replace those with regular TIM you ended up frying the RAM because the heatsinks had spacers built in so the pads wouldn't be completely compressed... so your new TIM never even touched. And of course if you put enough to touch, it acted as an insulator.

Moral of the story -- look at the cooling system the card came with carefully before you start scraping stuff off.
 
Depends on the individual. My 5870 gets to about 70C during gaming with 50% fan speed, which is good enough for me. No point risking messing up my card.
 
I always inspect and re-apply to every vid card. It takes all of 5 minutes and is worth it if only for the piece of mind.
 
Good tip, and if anyone knows if this voids warranty, let us know... I doubt it since there isn't a way for them to check really, but ya never know. They might apply food coloring maybe to make it look different? I'm just saying.... maybe the Galaxy rep on the Galaxy sticky thread can chime in?
 
Most of the big players -- EVGA and XFX, at least -- it doesn't void warranty for. ASUS, Galaxy, HIS and Sapphire it might "officially" but as others have said there's really no way for them to know in most cases.
 
Just to clarify it may take less than 5 minutes for people who have applied TIM to every card they've ever owned, plan on it taking you more than 5 minutes if you've never done it before. You will probably spend the first 5 minutes looking for instructions on doing it correctly if you've never done this sort of thing before (as well you should).
 
I've contemplated doing this as well but have gotten decent temps from my cards. If i had temp issues I would though.
 
Will any sort of processor TIM be adequate, or is there certain ones you should not utilize when doing this?
 
Personally I think x23 is by far the best for video cards and is all I use. It is easy to apply and wipes off completely with just a cloth if need be.

What is more important than what paste you buy is how you apply it. Don't just apply a drop and put the heatsink on. These are huge die's in this gen video cards. Also don't smother it.

The proper way to do it is to apply your TIM to the entire surface of the gpu die with as thin of a layer as possible. I personally put on the TIM and then carefully spread it over the entire surface with one of my business cards, which are very high quality fully coated cards. Some people use razor blades.

Remember the thinner you can get it, the better your temps will be. All you are doing with the tim is filling any bad contact areas between hsf and die. Metal on metal is a much better conductor than TIM if it was possible to get them both perfectly flat.

Also with the new generation cards the VRM's are usually the hottest part of the board measured by infrared probe. So if you can buy some small cheap heatsinks and cover them.
 
AS5 is great temperature wise but I hate it at this point, as I have had a couple of people bring me motherboards with AS5 inside the cpu socket or smeared on circuit traces. Only use AS if you are careful with it, it can kill your card or motherboard if you are very careless.
 
Since we're talking about thermal paste, I think it would be alright for me to ask this.

I've read different reviews on thermal paste, and there seems to be no clear winner with regard to temperatures. In some reviews, AS5 beats out X23 and MX-2, in others X23 does considerably better.

If I were going to reapply the TIM on my GPU and wanted to do it once, with the intent of getting as good a reduction in temp. as possible, which TIM would you guys recommend?
 
I never like to do more than necessary. I only needed to once for a card using factory settings. I've always been pretty lucky this way.
 
They are close enough that how you apply them will probably matter more than what you buy. I will always recommend X23 for video cards. Especially as you can't apply tons of pressure to most of the video card heatsinks.

For applications where you can apply pressure like, water cooling blocks, and you only want to do it once...

Coollaboratory Liquid Pro

It is the best TIM I have ever tested and is the only thing I use on my main system. It is probably the hardest TIM to apply and it has a curing time. Meaning temps will get better after it has been applied a while.

Nothing will get you better temps that I have heard about or used.
 
Darksword said:
Depends on the individual. My 5870 gets to about 70C during gaming with 50% fan speed, which is good enough for me. No point risking messing up my card.
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You neighbors must love that card. :p

silent-circuit said:
Most of the big players -- EVGA and XFX, at least -- it doesn't void warranty for. ASUS, Galaxy, HIS and Sapphire it might "officially" but as others have said there's really no way for them to know in most cases.
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I rmaed an MSI motherboard where I had swapped out the TIM on the factory heatsink and didn't have any issues.
 
[H]jimmy;1036610415 said:
They are close enough that how you apply them will probably matter more than what you buy. I will always recommend X23 for video cards. Especially as you can't apply tons of pressure to most of the video card heatsinks.

For applications where you can apply pressure like, water cooling blocks, and you only want to do it once...

Coollaboratory Liquid Pro

It is the best TIM I have ever tested and is the only thing I use on my main system. It is probably the hardest TIM to apply and it has a curing time. Meaning temps will get better after it has been applied a while.

Nothing will get you better temps that I have heard about or used.
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Thank you so much. :) You recommend X23 for the stock heatsink and Liquid Pro for WC. I'll be reapplying the stock heatsink.

I haven't read any direct comparisons but Indigo Extreme also has wtfareyoujoking performance. I believe Liquid Pro and IX would be similar.
 
Another sort of 'silly' question... I don't have a retailer around me that sells PC components really, so I normally use Newegg (like most everyone else).

I can't help but notice they don't sell X23. Where do you all get yours from?
 
FuriaRi0T said:
Another sort of 'silly' question... I don't have a retailer around me that sells PC components really, so I normally use Newegg (like most everyone else).

I can't help but notice they don't sell X23. Where do you all get yours from?
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Probably frozencpu, their cooling selection is far bigger than Newegg's.
 
I been thinking about doing it on my 2 480's but my temps are fine. They idle @ 42 and in LONG gaming seeions they get up to 72C. The main thing that I think about if I remove my heatsink I need to have some thermal pads ready. Once you remove a thermal pad from one side, it's wont be as effective.
 
This thread got me thinking and I'm now ordering a new tube of AS5 and am gonna do both of my 5770s as well as my 1090t. My 1090t with corsair h50 Idles at 40 degrees Celsius in a 70-72 degree Fahrenheit room and my 5770s idle in the mid to high 50 degree Celsius range.

I think I need to do the northbridge screw mod to my crosshair iv formula also. It idles near 65-70 degrees Celsius.
 
I have had to RMA ONE video card in my many years building computers, It had NOTHING to due with the card getting too hot. I have done after market cooling, putting new compound etc etc. The cards run well into safe temps unless there is an issue with the fan or the cooler not being seating properly.
 
I dont normally bother replacing TIM on video cards, too much of a hassle to remove the shroud and I typically just run my stuff at stock speed anyway (of the cards I've tried to overclock, the GPU temperature was fine but the other chips on it were cooking, prompting me to return them to stock speed to increase longevity).

The one card I've had an issue with trying to replace the TIM was my 4870. It has big thick thermal pads between the card and the steel frame of the shroud, cooling ram and other chips. Replacing the TIM on GPU made the ram/VDDC temperatures go higher than they were to start with because I couldn't get the pads to contact as well as they originally had been and overall the card was even worse in the end (though the GPU itself was cooler, everything else was slightly hotter).

I OC my CPU, but video cards these days seem to have short enough life spans without me making it worse, there's more on a video card that gets hot/damaged than just the GPU itself. So I'm happy enough to leave the stock TIM... unless the card is noisy in which case I'll just swap out the entire cooler.
 
I did a Crysis bench before changing the tim.
Did another bench afterwards, and my temperature results are almost exactly the same. ;)

Based off 3 bench loops and logging with GPUZ.
Both times peaked at 74C with 56% fanspeed. Idle temps might have gone down, but who cares.

I dont normally bother replacing TIM on video cards, too much of a hassle to remove the shroud and I typically just run my stuff at stock speed anyway (of the cards I've tried to overclock, the GPU temperature was fine but the other chips on it were cooking, prompting me to return them to stock speed to increase longevity).
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I typically setup custom fan profiles to keep my GPU's between 80C and 85C under load. Most cards seem pretty aggressive (and I've tested a lot recently) keeping the temps below 80C, which usually requires the fan to be louder than necessary...
If replacing the tim gets me a few C off my load temps, then it's already helping my fan stay quieter. :p
 
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