Question about heat sink seating

[tincart]

I made a thread earlier about the temps on my old Vapor-X 4890. The core temps were fine, but the MemIO temps were very high at idle (75-76C) and dangerous at load (106C). I did contact Sapphire about the issue and they offered to RMA it, but I figured since this is my old card I might as well play around instead.

Figuring the issue was simply poor application of thermal paste, I removed the heat sink and removed the crunchy thermal gunk with 99% isopropyl and a microfiber cloth and applied a nice thin layer of Arctic Silver Ceramique with a razor blade. Re-mounted the heatsink and booted. Core temps dropped about 5C at idle but the MemIO temps had actually gone up, sitting around 90C at idle.

Upon popping the card back out and removing the heatsink, I could see that the base of the heatsink was not making contact with the upper right corner of the GPU. My stopgap solution was to clean off the Ceramique and do a new layer, but this time leaving an extra thick layer to the problem corner.

The core temp is still fine, sitting at around 51C at idle but the MemIO is back to the original 76C. Clearly, it is making better contact with the extra goop, but still not enough to solve my issue.

Suggestions?

 

[superccs]

The goop is not going to thermally couple the heat sink with the memory (heatsource) without good pressure. Try to figure out a way to get that part of the heat sink to come in better contact with that memory surface other wise your going to high temps.

When trying to fix someing similar on a old P4 laptop I used a stack of aluminum foil to fill in a gap between the heat spreader and the gpu or something.

Take a piece of Al foil and fold it to the desired thickness and then cut out a portion to the exact size you need. Reapply a small amount of thermal past to it and see if that works.

 

[tincart]

Interesting solution. Did you apply the thermal paste on both sides of the foil?