This was KILLING this cards performance! 

I was here when J did the gag with the 780 and he said "Where's the Ti!?" Seeing the reference 980 sure was a blast from the past.

Recently picked up a second hand RTX 2080 Ti with the same issues. I replaced the fans, replaced the thermal paste & pads, and cleaned it up. Now it works like its brand new 👌🏼

That gpu design is a piece of art

I LOVE Phil’s laugh. The end got me 😂 💀 Great video as always!

That ending! LOL If he went from a happy to horrified expression it would have been a twitch emote for sure! LOL

Probably should’ve taken the cooler apart too, the shroud around the heat sink means there can actually be a lot of dust that gets accumulated on the heat sink itself that’s not that easy to blow out. A great video nonetheless, repasting does so much for anything pre-2021 when manufacturers moved on to using phase change material

I have an old 980Ti and an old 750Ti I cleaned up and repasted about two years ago. That really helped the performance a lot on both of them.

You mentioned the whole dead person being in the GPU thing. It reminded me of a story a coworker told me when I worked at a data center in Mexico about how a new NOC employee/intern got stuck/locked in one of the server racks during a holiday weekend, and he stayed trapped in there standing upright unable to sit down because there wasn't enough room to move for the 4 day break. Other people were in and out of the data center, but it was such a massive place and so loud, even though he could hear the doors (they make a loud beep when opened), they couldn't hear him screaming. But even worse, he knew the entire time that there was a fire suppression system test coming at the end of the holiday weekend, so he would have been panicking, because when the other employees got back they did a sweep of the data center to make sure it was empty of people, and then they activated a test of their argon fire suppression system while there was "no one left" in the data center. This system replaced all of the oxygen in the server farm with argon. The kid passed away in there, and they didn't find him until a couple days later when someone came to switch out the tape backups. The crazy thing? All the kid had to do was reach back and pull a little latch and it would have opened the rack door from the inside.. Freaking tragedy.

There is something about Phil being happy in your videos that gives me so much joy to listen to.

I just redid paste and pads on my 2080ti this week, the memory pads were hard and crumbly as dry clay! Temps obviously came down by a significant amount, it's absolutely worth doing.

These old cards can still live with the correct maintenance and still keep its performance good.

From TechPowerUp: The GeForce GTX 980 was a high-end graphics card by NVIDIA, launched on September 19th, 2014. So almost 10 years old. Nice to see that they can still work for some.

Tks for the reminder of old paste drying out. Have a person who is having issues with an older card that needs to be replaced and cannot afford it right now. This might give it a little more life until that new graphic card can be purchased.

Hey Jay, you seem to be looking and feeling better. I hope it all stays that way. Just wishing you well man. Thanks for all the cool vids 👍

It is so nice to see 4M! Congrats!! Still got my 1080 and just did this about 9 months ago.

1:18 man, if they had one that was fresh out from the box never used. it would also be good to see how much the performance has decarded over the years

Love this video. Like the throw back to the early years

I was not ready to hear a card only 1 generation older than mine referred to as "old school".

I needed this today, Jay's humor and Phil's laugh always makes me laugh.

Love that your still passionate about what made you to all of us. Your still “king” brother. How about an update on you? I feel like after so many years of watching you, and using you knowledge to improve my builds, ....your family an I hope your doing better. Love ya bro.

45fps in battlefield is kinda awesome for such an old card

So excited, exactly what I am like when describing any kind of tech to anyone I know and them looking at me like I have 3 heads.

Fun fact: the 900 series is the last with Windows XP drivers, officially up to the 960 but with a little tweak they all work.

I love these types of videos from you guys

I wonder if Jay has ever told a joke that Phil didn't bust a gut at?! Lmao😂

This is the stuff i like! I love videos on old hardware

Loving videos about optimizing and tweaking old hardware

I really enjoyed this content. Thanks for a great video.

That gpu cooler reminded me of Jay's videos back in 2014-2015 time

Just picked up one of the Mats from your store, thanks again

Always love the goofy stuff you guys come up with 😂 Keep it up!

I love these kind of vids. Keep em up!

Amazing video Jay! I dropped 16C and was able to crank my clocks way up on my 1080 thanks to these tips!

Thanks Jay!

Ha, ha! Jay knows what dust is REALLY made of... PEOPLE!

same cooler as the 1080ti the front screws remove the perpex plate allowing you to air duster it. i did this when i last dfismantled it and applied kryonaut to the cooler, made sucha difference to its boost clocks back in the day.

That outro, though! It was epic.

These little goofy videos are my favorites. I like the more informative videos as well, but these videos are just fun to watch.

Awesome video!

My dad recommended this channel to me and I am glad he did. You just earned a sub! 😃

Just started watching and love it already.

i actually gave someone this card a year or two ago for a upgrade for them. they were still using a gtx 760

An all time classic card, beautiful!

This was a fun one thanks.

i have a 1050ti that was black screening and flickering without load. I re-paste it and its perfectly fine again. so yes i agree heavily that a re-paste could do wonders! i was so close to just throwing away a good card. (ps i did upgrade to a 3060ti now and i love it)

Just sharing my experience with 440GT - it's cooler was so old, that it wasn't cooling the card at all. I've checked if it spins - and it was! But after I decided to repaste it I've noticed that the blade was basically rigid. So not only it managed to spin masking the issue of low cooling performance - it was most likely heating it up even more just because of spin resistance.

I use KPX thermal paste too. It is a very good paste.

I still have a reference 980 in my HTPC and was wondering it if was worth repasting it, that video was on point. My temps are still a lot better than that though so I'm still not sure if I'll do it

YEEEEEEES THATS THE KINDA VIDEO I LIIIIKE BRO

I have that exact same card in my computer. It's overdue for a cleaning and re-pasting, but that cooler's a pain to clean.

Thank you.

I use compressed air to clean my computer, but I stop the fans from moving with a toothpick or something when I blast them with air. With some multi-fan case setups, I can see a fan over revving just from too much positive airflow from other fans, so I think most fans now have diodes in them to stop current flow being generated. At least for the well made ones.

i did this same thing to my 980ti a couple months ago. Brough my temps down between 15-20*C depending on the game. Brought some life back to my card for a few more years probably!

I just picked up some MX-6 and some performance thermal pads for my 3080 which is getting into the 80 degree range and hot spots hitting 97+. Will be my first time taking apart a GPU to do some maintenance. Thanks for the video

Finally someone holds the fan when dusting it, been on about this for eons and I always got told nothing bad will occur.. Thanks @Jay zTwoCentsfor showing ppl this can and is an issue

Look for small gunsmithing tools and brushes. A scope brush worked very well for me on fans.

I did some maintenance on my used 3070 Ti - not *that* old of a card, and yet dropped 15 C thanks to new Gelid GP-Extreme pads and Gelid GC-Extreme paste. Still hits 105 C on the hotspot sometimes... but at least doesn't drop the clocks that hard.

Great video! My i7 6700k with a 980Ti still runs great in 1440p. No problem running OW2, D4, POE, LE... good maintenance does miracles.

I repasted a heavily used 7900xtx with Kryonaut extreme and idle temp dropped 10*, the stock paste had started to get hard. So I highly recommend doing this especially if you're on your computer hours everyday.

Phil busts out laughing every morning when Jay says hi. This guy would laugh at his own funeral

I still run a 980 strix and just ordered a new build less then a month ago. Never re-pasted but I clean it a few time a year.

Wow Jay! Thanks for this... I'm running a 2080ti that started giving me some issues a bit ago... maybe it just needs a little TLC to get the performance back.

Its funny that i saw this just now. I usually do a good dusting on my whole pc which also includes cleaning the fans. I was just thinking today "dang, my gpu is still a bit dusty, maybe i should do a detailed clean and re-paste." Great stuff. Jay always putting out very useful and inspiring videos!

I just had my amd rx 480 start hard resetting my computer the second I started furmark, so it was not a temp issue. It's old, I figured what do I have to lose so I took it apart to clean it and look the board over. It wasn't as bad as the card in this video, but it was dirty. I cleaned it and put it back together and now it works again. I think a piece of conductive dust was shorting something important. Bonus is since I thoroughly cleaned and repasted it, it dropped the temps by almost 20 degrees. I gained a few hundred points in furmark and now the fans are off when it's idle again.

Too many people, especially the so-called 'gurus' forget that the simplest changes can have huge impacts. Thanks for the solid content & testing, including any collabs with GN & der8auer. You all make tech FUN & easy to understand/relate to.

Good old founders edition. I still have a 1080ti fe. Shes still kickin in one of my guest PC's in my game room. Its always run hot... But I may give her an overhaul now that you've motivated me. Even if it drops 1c 😅

I really liked that design because of how easy the cards come apart. You can remove the entire fan and shroud without disturbing the heat sink.

Thanks for doing this i have a gtx 960 that was kindly given to me and it been through alot. So im doing this asap.

Love it! So safe to say an old 1080 gtx i gave to a friend could most likely see some improvements 😅

My wife got me one of the retro gaming mats for Christmas and I love it! Even the box it came in is cool AF.

KPX also suffers from pump out. As a repair technician, I've tried almost all known brands but the only paste that seems to old years at the highest temperature deltas is PTM7950

I bought a used Msi RTX 3070 Suprim X and the fans regularly flew at 100% even though I had my own curve set. The temperatures looked good except for the Hot spot, which went over 80 degrees Celsius. After replacing the old cooling paste, with the MX-6 paste is like new. The hot spot does not go above 75 degrees, and gpu temperatures go down about 10 degree. The fan curve in the MSI burner holds.

Great video concept! I run old cards (anything CUDA is useful for my little render farm)... Kinda hoping that cleaning them is useless.... because I don't want to clean them....... all!

the 980/980 ti reference (when they weren't called FE yet) were such good looking cards. I remember when Linus painted his 980 TI orange back in the day

With those design up to 1000th gen you can (almost) easily remove the front plastic cover and really clean the hestsink, so that could have helped also

Jay, next test it inside the case and see the difference...coz its an open air test bench you get awesome results.

Cleaning makes a lot of difference on those blower cards. Back on the last mining craze days od 2020, I built a rig with some used blower Vega 56 and I had to open and clean them every month, it made a lot of difference in its cooling.

I had 2 of the gtx980's in SLI, glad to see one opened up and cleaned. I upgraded to the RTX 3060 because of power draw and the heat that my system was getting in general. I still have the GTX 980's for relics sake. One is being used till this day on my dads living room PC for theatre purposes.

you are HERO!

the final clip absolutely SENT ME

Thank you for motivating me to do this on my old 1080 TI, it runs much cooler now. It has no backplate but a tripe fan + rgb shroud design nightmares are made of...no wonder it had never been taken apart before. It's a Gigabyte Aorus 1080TI Gaming OC for those who are curious...also one of my fans was dead(the one closest to gpu of course) so I just swapped it for one of the non dead ones (had no PWM signal on my OS but I do now since the one I swapped it for in the daisy chain had no PWM connector for some reason). Even with one dead fan out of 3 it still runs much cooler now. I looked on amazon to replace them but you have to buy the entire daisy chain...eh wait till it gets too hot this summer before I go through that ordeal again.^^'

This came out at a perfect time. I just built an old parts computer for my future step son to play Lethal company. The card I put in was a old GTX 770 my partner had left over. Runs the game just fine but reaches almost 80c with fan at full speed. Gonna pull it apart and clean it all out and reapply thermal paste.

I undusted my MBA rx 6800 yesterday that hashes rvn since it was released and bought back in 2020.(since it does not need thermal paste replacement). But it was so clogged up with dust and cat hair, I straight got 10 degrees better temps after cleaning was finished.

Wish that gaming mat had non freedom units to see how big it is, also more size options would have been nice

since the thermal paste pumped out, that left a gap that may explain why the screws felt so loose, air gap. Pressure was reduced

I use bristled toothpicks to clean small fan blades. Works good and cheap

A few years ago, before I bought my 6700 XT, I was still using an old R9 290x. I replaced the thermal paste on it a year or so before I retired it and the difference was night and day. The idle temps went down by 20C, and while performance didn't increase using stock settings, the fans didn't have to run nearly as hard. With AMD known for having bad coil whine, you better believe that was such a relief to the ears.

Repasted my MSI 1080 last month with Kryonaut Extreme and replaced the thermal pads. It no longer passes 60C.

Fantastic videos. I would love to know how many people even knew their GPU has thermal paste.

Me over here with a 970 lol 3minths ago i did a deep clean and repast... first time for that card

10:02 That looks like mine, even after repasting... GPUs usually have a better pressure and dont need that much paste between the die and the cooler to fill the gaps.

Wish I could get one of the retro gaming mats!!! Always sold out when I check !!

I bought a 970 in 2021 and since I had been out of the topic for almost a decade it took me a few weeks to figure out that the thing was thermal throttling all the time. Tbf playing Doom 2016 on 1080p back then didn't give much of a hint. I didn't have new pads at hand but I repasted the die and I was actually quite happy with it until I finally got my 30 series.

OMG, the end of the video was the best.

in the sink it goes Jay!! :)

The 980 came out in the time I really started getting into pc gaming. Always gamed on pc since I was young but around 2014 I wanted my own pc. I would binge watch multiple build views from different channels and that’s how I learned how to build a PC. Eventually bought my cousins old rig very cheap in 2019 and the only parts left from that pc are the cpu, ram and motherboard. All the rest either broke or got replaced.

I had dried paste on a used Asus TUF 3090.. They really cheapen out on paste sometime and put stickers on the worse spot too.

nice one phil and jay you two are funny at the end with your face like that yes you are yep LOL. 😁😆😲🤯

Hey Jay, don't you have a ultrasonic machine you could throw that card into? It would clean it up lickety split.

I still run a 1080ti for mostly maxed 1440p gaming from evga. I do tear it down every now and then and clean and renew it and have had no issues out of it since day one use. It's all about the love and care of the hardware.