Rapid Overheating on 980 GTX

[dougp]

My 980 was on water, but I recently put the stock cooler back on because I'm reducing footprint. This is a reference board, but I booted up and all seemed fine. I then watched my GPU temp start skyrocketing and then BAM, black screen. I thought maybe there wasn't enough contact for the thermal paste, so I reseated the heatsink with new thermal paste - still, same issue. After 5-10 minutes on desktop, GPU gets to 90C and black screens.

I completely uninstalled drivers and did a clean install but no go. Any other thoughts? Worked perfectly fine on water.

 

[96Firebird]

Did you make sure the fan was working? Also, how much thermal paste are you using?

 

[dougp]

Did you make sure the fan was working? Also, how much thermal paste are you using?

Fan works, screams like a banshee when the temps go up. I used a little less than a pea of thermal paste.

 

[soccerballtux]

what kind of thermal paste?

you might need more than that.

be very very very careful in fact I would just get a thermal pad to be on the safe side-- I cooked 2 cards by getting AS5 on the capacitors next to the GPU core. It's not conductive, but it is capacitive!!!

 

[dougp]

what kind of thermal paste?

you might need more than that.

be very very very careful in fact I would just get a thermal pad to be on the safe side-- I cooked 2 cards by getting AS5 on the capacitors next to the GPU core. It's not conductive, but it is capacitive!!!

I used Gelid Extreme and TX-4. Where can I get pads? I'd rather try that.

 

[DownTheSky]

Take off the cooler and re-apply the TIM. Either the cooler is not seated properly or there isn't enough paste.

 

[dougp]

Take off the cooler and re-apply the TIM. Either the cooler is not seated properly or there isn't enough paste.

You're probably right in that there isn't enough space. I'm used to waterblocks, where they have a cutout that avoids the heatspreader - I'll reapply using the X-method, that's what I did when I put the stock cooler on my Titan Z and I never had issues like this. I'm also going to order some thermal pads, just in case.