To replace thermal paste or not

S

sanders4617

Weaksauce
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Jul 16, 2009
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I've recently acquired a GTX 1080 Ti.. cheaper version (Asus Turbo).

It's been fine for me.. temps during intense gaming about 83F max without the fan kicking up. If I manually turn the fan up, it does get loud but will also cool down a good bit.

I've got some Thermal Grizzly that I'm gonna use for a new CPU I'm getting ready to install.. and thought about maybe replacing the thermal paste that's on my GPU - if the benefits are there to be had.

I don't necessarily want to void the warranty, and not sure that it will anyway.. but I also don't care to mess with it if there won't be much help with temps and possible OC in the future.

Any opinions on the matter? And no.. I'm not spending more money on water cooling. I'm honestly fine with the performance, but thought I could go ahead and do this since I will have it all out (if the results are worth the trouble).

Thanks
 
Sure.. it should be fine and may help fix your heat issue.

I would recommend checking out any videos on line and make sure you are prepared for anything wonky.
 
modi123 said:
Sure.. it should be fine and may help fix your heat issue.

I would recommend checking out any videos on line and make sure you are prepared for anything wonky.
Click to expand...

For sure. I'll probably watch 20 videos lol.

I've seen some people comment that their temps dropped up to 10C.. and then others that said their temp didn't change. I guess that would all depend on if you had crap thermal grease/paste before, etc.

From what I've read.. my temps seem to be in normal range for this card (and others like it)
 
Side mention - I would just do the chip and not any of the RAM bits. They may have (pink) thermal pads that sit on top.. just let those be.

Typically there is little downside, and at worst you are at the same temps as before. I am curious how much of a difference it will make.
 
^ what they said. if the oem paste or mounting is crap youll see an improvement.
 
83C for that cooler is quite good. I don’t anticipate you seeing more than a 1-3 degree improvement. Not worth the hassle unless you’re going to replace the cooler entirely IMO
 
Well first, is it 83F or 83C ? 83F seems unrealistic... and 83C is fine. Applying thermal paste on GPU is trickier than CPU at least from my experience... I had to redo it 10 times on a 7950.
Also, it may void your warranty so unless you're having the fan kick in at 100% I wouldn't touch that... too much risk for probably nothing.

EDIT: If you're still going to do it, ensure you work on an ESD safe surface and ground yourself with a wrist wrap. You can't be too cautious with ESD and electronics.
 
Well I did it. Lol.

Temps dropped about 2C with fan in auto mode. So nothing major.

Upgraded from i5 4690k to i7 8700k. Heaven benchmark went from a click over 3500 to about 3650 with that upgrade.

All is well. System not having to rev up to run any games.

Battlefield 1 will actually run at 120hz smooth as butter. Before with the i5, in 64 player MP.. did not quite handle it at 120fps.
 
I’ve never seen a significant drop in temp after ditching factory paste for the good stuff. Over the years I’ve tried on 5 different cards. Maybe 1-2C drop. The peace of mind was the more rewarding part. Sometimes the factory really goops it on there.
 
If you're not changing the default behavior of the card, the clocks will drop after every 4º C after 52º C so ideally you'd want to keep the temperature at 55º C or lower which is best achieved by water cooling it.
 
Algrim said:
If you're not changing the default behavior of the card, the clocks will drop after every 4º C after 52º C so ideally you'd want to keep the temperature at 55º C or lower which is best achieved by water cooling it.
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The default behavior of my Strix 1080Ti lets it hit 70C.
I have terrible experience with custom fan curve, mostly because they frequently seem to fail to apply - resulting in no fan ramp up (yay hitting thermal throttle).
My custom fan curve kept it under 65.

I'm probably going to put LM on it once I get the chance.
 
I have a 1070 Strix and while the fan will turn on at 60º C it will stair-step down as soon as it hits 56º C. I ran the GPU-Z logging function to capture all the information in a CSV file and then imported it into a spreadsheet to observe its behavior. I'll admit that my one representative sample may not be definitive but I'd seen enough posts on other forums that described the same behavior that I don't think I have an outlier.

In any case, temperature is a clear delimiter on clock boost so regardless of the exact temperature that will down clock your Pascal card, lower really is better.
 
Algrim said:
In any case, temperature is a clear delimiter on clock boost so regardless of the exact temperature that will down clock your Pascal card, lower really is better.
Click to expand...

I wasn't actually disagreeing you with my last post.
I was just pointing out the fact that if the TIM is a limiting factor in particular a cooling setup, changing that alone can affect the turbo behavior.

In my 1080Ti, fussing about with the fancurve produces undesirable results - many times I'd run a game then start stuttering because the crap software provided failed to ramp up the fan when it was supposed to. In fact, back with my GTX 285, Rivatuner had issues with the fan as well - probably toasted my card. I don't intend to water cool it, so LM is basically my best shot at making the card run cooler/faster without messing with the clocks.

My roommate's gaming laptop has a GTX 1060. The LM repaste with no changes to any of the stock configurations - didn't change the GPU temps, fans ran slower, and also made the turbo hold 25mhz higher.
 
Quick question.. running MSI Afterburner... played BF1 for about 30 minutes and then looked at my history

GPU1 Core Clock went to 3082 and stayed there.
GPU1 Memory Clock went to 1873 and stayed there.
GPU1 power went to 55508 and stayed there.
GPU Fan speed fluctuated around 68-71 throughout.

Is this normal or ok for the 1080 ti stock? Just looking into all of this because I have the "Cheaper" 1080ti card.
 
sanders4617 said:
GPU1 Core Clock went to 3082 and stayed there.
GPU1 Memory Clock went to 1873 and stayed there.
Click to expand...
I believe you reversed those numbers. But they're pretty similar to mine, actually.

The 1080Ti doesn't turbo nearly as aggressively as the rest of the product stack.
 
Oh yeah I was off lol.

Core was 1873
Memory was 5508
Fan speed was much lower than I said.. the 68-71 was the temperature during the gaming lol.
 
I wouldn’t hesitate. You got a boost, just a minor one. Importantly, in a couple years you’ll know it’s fine, rather than waiting for it to get bad enough to be worth it. Thermal compound degrades with time as it dries out. I just worked on a transmitter that blew up because the compound got too bad and it didn’t power itself down for self protection.
 
Well stupid me didn’t do a good benchmark to before to see where the fans were having to rev up to in able to keep the temp down.

I know I’m Heaven benchmark, the temps were about 2C cooler than before, but possible that the fan speed was slightly higher? Not sure

But playing BF1.. the temp of the card was averaging 68-71. Fan speeds were I believe 45% or so if I’m not mistaken.

Not sure how that compares with more quality fans on these cards. Sorry I didn’t get the preliminary tests done like I should have. I was in such a hurry to get the job done.
 
Every video card I've ever owned I've replaced the GPU thermal paste after running the card stock for a week or thereabouts. My go to is AS5 Ceramique since it doesn't take very long to cure and has done a very good job at dropping GPU temps 2 to ~8c.
 
not worth it really to replace paste. You risk card rejection at Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS and other companies as well if you break the cooler screw seal(s) to gain what, 1 degree C? If you want to re-paste or install a different cooler I highly recommend you spend the extra $$$ and buy an EVGA card. Their card replacement warranty and Customer Service are stellar, 24/7 tech phone support (takes on average 3 minutes to reach a tech on the phone) ... what more could you want?
 
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