- Mar 9, 2005
- 16,187
- 4,871
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I've been noticing that my cooling fan has been spinning faster and faster to cool my card so I decided to take it out to clean the dust bunnies from the fan and cooling block fins. I took the shroud off to access the fins on both the fan and aluminum heat sink with a small brush. While I was down that far I decided to just go ahead and replace the TIM with arctic silver 5 since I have plenty on hand.
When I got the heat sink off I was appalled by the lack of TIM on the gpu which was spotty at best. I should've taken a picture of the gpu before I cleaned it off as what you see on the block is far more generous than what was attached to the gpu itself. After cleaning everything up with alcohol and cotton balls I proceeded to spread out the AS5 using a thin piece of cardboard being careful not to get any on the adjacent resistors.
Once I was finished I used q-tips and alcohol to clean the resistors just to be sure nothing was on there so I wouldn't short anything out. After reassembling it I reinstalled it into my pc and fired it up immediately noticing that my idle temp was now equal to that of my cpu for the first time ever. I'm going to do some gaming on it later to heat it up to help cure it. The hardest part of this was finding small enough Allen wrenches to fit the two different sized screws holding this on along with the 4 tiny philips head screws holding the base of the fan frame. I really wish that I'd done this sooner as the difference is quite noticeable.
When I got the heat sink off I was appalled by the lack of TIM on the gpu which was spotty at best. I should've taken a picture of the gpu before I cleaned it off as what you see on the block is far more generous than what was attached to the gpu itself. After cleaning everything up with alcohol and cotton balls I proceeded to spread out the AS5 using a thin piece of cardboard being careful not to get any on the adjacent resistors.
Once I was finished I used q-tips and alcohol to clean the resistors just to be sure nothing was on there so I wouldn't short anything out. After reassembling it I reinstalled it into my pc and fired it up immediately noticing that my idle temp was now equal to that of my cpu for the first time ever. I'm going to do some gaming on it later to heat it up to help cure it. The hardest part of this was finding small enough Allen wrenches to fit the two different sized screws holding this on along with the 4 tiny philips head screws holding the base of the fan frame. I really wish that I'd done this sooner as the difference is quite noticeable.
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