URGENT post about 8800GT 512

[DarkZeratul]

Well, a good friend of mine has a PNY 8800GT 512 for almost a year. That's a fancy graphics card; I suggested to him to install a thermal monitoring utility form the start -think he installed cpu-Z- and of course Riva Tuner, because a lot of folks recommend that in this forums. As far as I know he used this software to set the card's fan to 80% of its total range.

But two or three weeks ago, his rig went into 'graphic hiccups' every time he was playing graphics-intensive games, like STALKER or COD5. He has to restart his PC to gain control of the rig; then he opened up his rig, and say to me he found visible marks of dust and lint outside and INSIDE his graphics card. Before that, he found -with the monitoring software- his 8800 went through the 100 Celcius barrier, and even trough the 110...!

So, it's no necessary to say he wants to clean up his rig completely; the point is he even wants to open up the casing of the GCard to make 'a more effective use of a compressed-air can' and taking all the dust and lint off the GPU and DDR3 memory. And the point is... Can you make this kind of thing without causing any harm to the delicate parts of a 8800, 9800 OR ANY graphics card? Anand and his folks do this kind of thing EVERY TIME they want to show the 'beholio' [most intimate parts] of a GCard to all the peasants [me and others]. This implies that this peasants can do the same thing WITHOUT any specific tool? There is no necessity of ANY kind ot thermal paste to put all the GCard parts back together?

He wants to operate on wednesday. This rig gave some friends a new perspective on videogames, one very different perspective from, say, the CONSOLE perspective... So we will expect your suggestions ASAP. Thanks in advance for all the info !!!

 

[DarkZeratul]

Of course [OF COURSE] this can´t be an unusual situation. So, any harmless way of getting rid of the excessive dust and lint outside and INSIDE a > US$200 graphics card will be very -I mean VERY- appreciated...

 

[brblx]

if it's the single slot cooler, expect 60*C idle temps and maybe 90 at full load with the fan on high. they run effing hot. i've reseated the cooler on my evga 8800gt and it idles at about 62* with 50% fan.

sounds to me like his fan might not have been maxxing out, plus excessive dust build up. clean and reseat the cooler on the gpu with some good thermal grease. AS ceramique is available at radioshack.

 

[DarkZeratul]

Ok brblx, many thanks. So I'm understanding that it is necessary to open up the PNY... To that extent, we will going to need a Phillips screwdriver AND I think the AS Ceramique is some kind of thermal paste, don't it? Hope you get some info about HOW MUCH COST that thermal paste [excuse our curiosity]

 

[Schmide]

AS Ceramique is about 6 bucks at RS.

The 8800gt is an open die. Make sure you clean all the other stuff off the core. I use alcohol and a few quetips. I then use a small instrument (i like a quetip broke in half) I like to spread less than a millimeter over the whole die. Total used grain of rice/BB. This differs with the actual instructions from AS. Just don't put too much or too little.

 

[Denithor]

Dust doesn't build up between the heatsink & core of a video card. They are in firm contact with thermal paste between - nowhere for dust to settle. Dust can clog up the fan itself pretty bad though & that's what you need to clear out. Just blow out the fan shroud thoroughly and see what the temps are before doing anything more intrusive.

BTW - what card manufacturer made this card? If EVGA, XFX or BFG and your friend registered within 30 days there should be a lifetime warranty against problems like you have described (visual artifacts etc from overheating). Other makers often only offer a 1 year warranty so you may be out of luck if he chose a lower-tier manufacturer.

If you decide to remove the heatsink you will use a phillips screwdriver to take out all the screws from the backplate and then rock the heatsink until it loosens and you can pop it off. Clean the old thermal paste from both the heatsink and GPU core (be VERY careful working around the core itself). As mentioned above, rubbing alcohol (91% preferably) and Qtips or cottonballs are the best method to remove the old thermal paste.

Before you remove the thermal paste - note how much was used, you want to apply about the same amount of Arctic Silver Ceramique to the core before you remount the heatsink.

And note - anytime you do stuff like this to a delicate component there's a chance you will mess something up. Make sure you can afford to buy your friend a new video card before you take his apart - if it doesn't work at all when you reassemble he's not going to be happy with you.