Saturday afternoon experiment. We all know that thermal paste has a shelf life, but if the rest of the card seems to be in good condition, is it worth the hassle of changing it?
With contact spray you can clean PCB , it will be like new . I use contact spray first then i spray silicone spray , it gives nice new shine and PCB is protected from dust and moisture
I did this on my brother's zotac 1070 mini and saw 10 degrees improvement. The original paste was dry and squished to one side. Now it runs below 70C at full load in a thermaltake core v1.
I have the exact same card and NZXT case. I actually haven't had any issues with the card fans ramping up while gaming to the point where the noise is annoying, and I have the fan curve set to aggressive in Precision X1. The case fans I'm running have fan blades designed more for static pressure than airflow, and I think that helps overcome the front airflow restriction inherent with the case. I'm going to try running running the FurMark stress test as you did, and see what results I get.
What I noticed was, my GTX 1060 was making more noticeable noise when it CHANGES speed, or rather it was more annoying to hear the constant speed up under varying load conditions. If the card's fan profile was manually set to a fairly high constant speed, although this was audible, it was less annoying and distracting, whilst also allowing higher boost clock speeds. I used MSI Afterburner to make a slight OC profile with a 78% fan speed, now I just set that profile when I'm gaming and turn it to auto (silent) when not gaming.
My Gigabyte RTX 2070 went from 81ºC to 74ºC after changing the paste to CoolerMaster's. Same temperature as when I first bought it. And it was only 14 months old.
I repasted my 2080 (gigabyte wf oc) about a year in and went from 82°C to 74°C under full load with an overclock. That made a very audible difference to me! A friend with a 2080 Ti reported similar results
Was that your first time replacing thermal paste on GPU? My 980 has crazy temperatures, it's 94+ with full load and i'm very afraid if i'll broke something while trying to change thermal paste on GPU.
@@Voidolt I practiced on an old GPU before that, I had the same concern. If you're careful and plan ahead carefully you should be fine though. Keep in mind you might need new thermal pads as well. Don't overtighten screws and keep track of where they came from and when disassembling look after the fan-cable on the PCB. You might want to see if someone has taken your specific model apart previously and put that on youtube, so you'll know what awaits you.
I favour the airflow first since it has benefit for the CPU as well. I try so hard not to go right to thermal paste, so much can go wrong mucking around in a working card. If Im actually fixing a none working card, oh heck yeah, I'll paste that bad boy while putting it back together.
Minus Pads from Thermal Grizzly work quite well. They're sold in 3 different square sizes, 30 x 30mm, 100x100, 120x120. and in 4 different thickness. And as far as comments about immediately replacing the preapplied thermal paste on new GPU's goes... Stock of GPU's that sat around back in the yesteryears was definitely a real thing. There's also some outliers that cheaped out (MSI MECH GPU's, etc) and had crazy high thermals. Waiting for reviews definitely helps in that aspect. But particularly nowadays, I feel power draw has gotten to the point that when their engineers are putting together the thermal solution for these GPU's, it becomes far more cheaper to run better bulk paste, than it is to add more copper, or mass in general. When AMD confirms and smiles about 90c being "okay", but redline is literally just 10 more degrees, I think it's become something they cannot afford to skimp out on anymore. Short supply etc, do you really want the RMA problems? That's not to say that swapping to Kryonaut wouldn't help, but we're applying an aftermarket "performance" paste at this point. If the GPU doesn't run out of spec when you first give it a run, give it at least WEEK to see if thermals get even better. Any veteran will tell you the same about ANY thermal paste you apply as well. Give it some time to burn in, evaluate your prior readings to your current ones and go from there. If everything OK, run the GPU. Years later chances are the thermal paste has gone dry, give it a repaste. You're cleaning the heatsink before you repaste anyhow, and depending on your situation, that's likely going to be the real MVP more than the paste. Water gets into brake fluid and it's sometimes just a good idea to have it flushed alongside your brake pad replacement. The flush of the brake fluid in many cases restores a lot of the firmness people attributed to when the vehicle was new, who would otherwise have the same soft brakes no matter how much they spent on pads, Amazing.
I have a cheapo style blower fan GTX 1070 that has substantial coil whine and jet engine noise, which would be bad enough anyway but MSI also thought it would be cool to put an OC bios on it (the same one they put on their dual fan card). The card sits at 83 degrees constantly during heavy gaming, and the fan is as loud as my original dust filled PS4. I did what you did here and replaced the thermal paste. It hasn’t dramatically changed anything, but I can definitely notice it running slightly quieter and maintaining higher boost clocks. I think EVGA might have used better thermal paste on yours than my MSI card. Definitely going to splash out on one of Nvidia’s next range of cards this year, one with sensible cooling. PSA: you can find great deals on second-hand blower fan cards for a reason - they literally sound like they’re broken lol
I saw a comment on another video which said that graphics cards have target temperatures, and if we add a really good cooler onto a card, it might stay at the same temperature at before. Except it's quieter, because it runs the fan slower since it will still run at the target temperature. Maybe that happened to yours, except you didn't add a crazy cooling system. But you still improved it and the fan is quieter. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6HbCY3-tun0.html
@@Bolobbini On my old GTX 970 - 6Y, i changed the paste today! Was incredebly a huge difference. I got 3°c differents on desktop doing nothings (29c) and in game with ARK, i used to be at 50°C with 90% fans, now the same temperature with only 60% fans. With 100% fans, i get like 45°C in game. Very happy for an 6 Yold video cards
@@evanl3985 Oh yes i forgot. Changing the thermal paste on my GPU did not change the temps. It runs the same. Forgot about this post and now my PC i rocking a RTX 3080
Yes it is worth it. If your video card is about 3 years old, you should redo the thermal paste.. and usually a good thermal paste PC enthusiasts use will last longer than the cheap stuff they put in GPUs. Also wroth picking up thermal pads for VRMs and RAM. I also have replaced the thermal pads on the heatsinks on my motherboard (on it's VRMs since the old pads were dry and wearing thin) since it's about 7 years old (it's a X79 mobo so it's rather old) it's helped it's longevity, and it's still working today
Look at the frumark temperature graph before and after, how fast did it reach the load temperature, Its bad for the dye to increse the temperature that fast because the thermal expansion is what kills it, breaks the soldier balls in it that everyone tries to fix by sticking them into the oven.
I have a GTX 650 and the temperature was 78°C and i tryed a PC fan alone and put my hand between it to sens which way the air flow goes better, but the fan makes me sens the same air flow in both directions, so i managed to put in a pipe a sort of tunel, then the air apears to flow in one direction, the i glued a one centimetre pipe up the GPU fan, and the result was 48°c, please try it, you'll be amazed.
I haven't tinkered with the fan curve yet... the problem there is that if you lower the fan curve you get more heat... and the fan will speed up. All you'll do is hurt boost clocks. However, increasing the fan curve might actually help, because it's not just the noise, it's the harmonic vibration I get at a certain speed. So tuning it up to always skip past that bit and go slightly faster would actually be more preferable.
As long as you know what you're doing and don't tend to break stuff. Every new video card should have its thermal paste replaced. You will almost always see a noticeable improvement just from using better quality paste. Shame on video card manufactures, but this does seem to be a constant for the last 10 years.
I did this to my gpu and only got 3c of a difference. And that's with an agressive curve in msi afterburner. My gpu hits 70s\80s. My gpu fans are at 100% when like this so very noisy. The rest of my computer is silent. I use a headset just to drown out the noise of the gpu fans.
Why not set a fan curve with Afterburner or something? but nothing wrong with 58% fans at 74c, not that bad really, and them pads are not EVGA OEM, they are replacements sent out by EVGA because they forgot to put pads in rear, I believe so they sent these out as a complete set, I would replace them soon as mate with EKWB OR THBERMAL GRIZZLYS and there was a bios update to ramp up fan speed 400rpm to compensate heating issues
When you apply fresh new thermal paste you'll get the worst results. It will improve over time as the GPU will get hot, get cold, get hot, get cold etc
Love your insightful videos! Been following a couple of board-level repair YT streams and have gotten really fond of yours. More people should subscribe for sure. After watching this particular video, I feel inclined to draw the conclusion to just clean out the fan of my laptop (with a dedicated GPU) instead of reapplying thermal paste or possibly also replacing the thermal pads, because the temperatures don't seem to have changed after 7 years of use. So, with the goal of maximizing LIFE EXPECTANCY of a laptop, cleaning out the fans once in a while appears to be quite worthwhile (compared to taking out the motherboard, removing heatsink, etc. -- it's a lot more work in a laptop and a more delicate case, too), wouldn't you say ? Can you weigh in on laptop GPUs? Would your takeaway message be any different?
Cheers! Definitely keep the fans clean, yes. Dust is a serious enemy of laptops. There's a strong lean toward re-pasting laptop GPUs and VRMs as well, if it's a gaming laptop, but I haven't read into it much. If you haven't got any noticeable issues then yea, just dust it out. On the other hand, if your laptop isn't hard to disassemble then it may be worth it, but that depends. Some gaming laptops are nightmareishly difficult to take apart.
@@Adamant_IT Wow, thanks for your speedy and helpful reply. It's an Asus x93s, idle temps are 50-60°C (GPU&CPU) and it falls down to that quite quickly after stopping a game which can especially cause the GPU to run constantly hot at !! 96°C). According to some reviews, it is "normal". Would you agree with that? But as a conclusion for myself: Since I'm not gaming with this laptop, I'll stick with fan cleaning. Interesting point with the VRMs, will learn more about that and report back. More importantly, where can I find a written intro for board-level repair please? I'm particularly interested in pinpointing faults on boards without available schematics as a challenge/hobby. I have watched your board repair basics playlist some time ago and was wondering how to approach this endeavor best? Your videos are very encouraging to try it out myself at least once in my life and resuscitate a patient (=board). I don't intend to become an expert, just want to go through the procedure once for fun.
Yea if you're not gaming on it I wouldn't worry too much. If it was a main gaming laptop, I'd deffo say that's thermal throttling though. Written stuff is hard to find these days... there might be something out there, but I learned from RU-vid myself, so that's all I know! The hard bit is finding stuff to practise on. I run a shop and even I only get a board repair job in now and then. What you can do though, is buy an old, but common laptop, find the schematic for it, and just spend time probing it with a multimeter, seeing if you can figure out where everything is from the schematic and measuring the voltages/signals.
@@Adamant_IT Yes, you're right with the thermal throttling (that was something a reviewer complained about too, e.g. here: www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-K93SM-YZ085V-Notebook.73450.0.html#toc-emissions). It's been designed that way, unfortunately. Okay, thanks again for your advice! I'll stick with your fantastic channel. Keep up the great work.
buying second hand graphics cards sounds extremely risky... never know if it's been run through with crypto. I think I would rather buy AMD card and see how well I can make it run
Honestly, I've no idea how much life crypto mining knocks out of a card... I'd be interested to know if anyone's actually done testing on that. But in any case, yea second hand will always be a gamble. The risk depends on if you're willing to go through the hassle of returning it if it's faulty, and touch wood, I've not hit any absolute lemons yet when buying second hand stuff.
@@Adamant_IT Late to the party, but I've bought quite a few mining cards. It's usually just dead fans and baked Thermal paste - They usually just need to be cleaned, and you can usually restore some life out of the fans with electrical Cleaner and silicone lube. The actual cards will usually go for a very long time, the mining Bios' tend to under-volt to maximize profits by reducing energy costs so there's not as much electrical wear generally speaking. Regardless, EVGA GPU's, like this card, are really good used gambles, because EVGA will honour transferred warranty, and As long as it shows up in the original configuration they don't ask many questions - Even people asking on their forums have been told "We don't care if you stripped it down to water-cool, as long as you put it back to factory when you send it in, we'll cover it." EVGA is probably the safest card to buy on the secondary market - Without receipt, the warranty follows the product itself and goes for 3 years from the date EVGA shipped it out, so you have a pretty good idea if you'll be covered or not.
costs almost nothing but a few moments of your time so why not, and a couple bucks on thermal paste to get your multi hundred dollar card working right is worth it in my books even if it does very little. it's not like it takes special knowledge other than righty tighty lefty loosely.
I highly recommend AS5 with 99% Silver concentrate, or Iif your cooler cold plate is copper then Thermal grizzly liquid metal qand I would replace thermal pads and dude has this PC ever been used its zero dust in case, dust filters aren't that good, lol 😂😂
That heatsink is really huge but... it's full aluminium, no copper at all, which is sad for a mid-high tier card. I mean, even the GTX 960 had copper pipes.
I only know of 1 card that has copper fins and that card was $1000 above MSRP. It's just way too expensive for little to no gain to have copper fins. I mean saying your $250 960 had a few heat pipes doesn't exactly justify putting copper fins on a $350 card...
It's quite likely that the pipes are just plated in something that's grayish-silvery color for aesthetics, I don't think aluminum would take well to being hammered into the shape of a pipe like how copper does. The only way to really know would be to scratch off the top layer, though.
dude noooo ...dont ever clean cards with alcohol like that youre essentially plugging up the vents under the transistors and ic's ....some dawn on a paint brush and really hot water in sink will get almost all that oil from the pads off then let it dry in front of a fan overnight if its summer where you are and best yet if youre heats on in front of a heat vent. secondly that paste job dude was even worse you only need a rice grain size amount if youre not going to do it correctly ...the best way is to spread it with a spreading tool or a credit card...thirdly you never EVER recycle thermal pads that are that deteriorated. but honeslty if youre NOT gonna do it correctly dont even do it at all , especially in front of the world to see while claiming youre a pc tech!
