- Oct 23, 2000
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I'm sure most (if not everyone) is aware of this, but just a friendly reminder to keep your hard working electronics properly cooled. Particularly since we tend to abuse them with DC projects...
And thermal paste (even the expensive stuff) does have an effective lifespan and needs to be replaced occasionally.
I noticed the other day that my main home PC wasn't feeling as "snappy" as it used to in games so I did some poking around and found that the i7-3770 CPU was peaking up near 80C (not dangerous, but still toasty) and the EVGA GTX 1060 was throttling itself at 83C.
I had replaced the Arctic Silver 5 on them about 6 months ago so this was kind of a surprise. I did some reading and learned that AS5 has a limited shelf life, and the tube I had used was quite old. I bought a new tube of Noctua NT-H1 (both for something different, and because it was on sale). I replaced the AS5 on both the CPU and the GPU and let them 'cook' for a while under max load, and according to GPU-Z the CPU is maxing out around 68C and the GPU is staying at about 73C. A much bigger improvement than I expected, and most importantly, keeping the GTX 1060 below its throttling temperature so it doesn't slow itself down from 1810MHz core (stock 'boost' speed) to around 1500MHz any more.
And thermal paste (even the expensive stuff) does have an effective lifespan and needs to be replaced occasionally.
I noticed the other day that my main home PC wasn't feeling as "snappy" as it used to in games so I did some poking around and found that the i7-3770 CPU was peaking up near 80C (not dangerous, but still toasty) and the EVGA GTX 1060 was throttling itself at 83C.
I had replaced the Arctic Silver 5 on them about 6 months ago so this was kind of a surprise. I did some reading and learned that AS5 has a limited shelf life, and the tube I had used was quite old. I bought a new tube of Noctua NT-H1 (both for something different, and because it was on sale). I replaced the AS5 on both the CPU and the GPU and let them 'cook' for a while under max load, and according to GPU-Z the CPU is maxing out around 68C and the GPU is staying at about 73C. A much bigger improvement than I expected, and most importantly, keeping the GTX 1060 below its throttling temperature so it doesn't slow itself down from 1810MHz core (stock 'boost' speed) to around 1500MHz any more.
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