Shammy
08-26-2009, 10:14 PM
So the story goes like this, I've had 3 GTX 280s I was benching close to a year ago. I've almost never removed the GPU pots from them. They had the GPU shim removed.
A few months ago a friend needed a card to play some games. So I finally unmounted the pot on one of the cards after more than half a year. I unmodded it and put it back on the stock cooler. First boot and I got greeted with artifacts. I remounted the pot back on the card and the artifacts went away. So I knew that some of the bga solder balls of the gpu core had broken and contacts were not made without the card flexing. So with some spacers to apply pressure at the right spots, the card was working fine air-cooled.
Then I tried to run some 3D but the card overheated after a short while. which was weird so I placed a probe at the IHS of the core and also looked at the core temp with furmark. There was a huge discreprancy, the core was really hot but the IHS was not. So that means that the thermal interface between core and IHS had crapped out.
I removed the IHS and saw that the thermal interface had become a very thin grey peelable piece of peper-like material. I removed the pot from another card and found the same phenomenon.
So now i think it's better to leave the shim on the card when mounting pots. As for the thermal interface with IHS, I can't really say what happened but maybe at really low temps like -160C as I have tried on the cards, the TIM sorta changed properties after some time.
A few months ago a friend needed a card to play some games. So I finally unmounted the pot on one of the cards after more than half a year. I unmodded it and put it back on the stock cooler. First boot and I got greeted with artifacts. I remounted the pot back on the card and the artifacts went away. So I knew that some of the bga solder balls of the gpu core had broken and contacts were not made without the card flexing. So with some spacers to apply pressure at the right spots, the card was working fine air-cooled.
Then I tried to run some 3D but the card overheated after a short while. which was weird so I placed a probe at the IHS of the core and also looked at the core temp with furmark. There was a huge discreprancy, the core was really hot but the IHS was not. So that means that the thermal interface between core and IHS had crapped out.
I removed the IHS and saw that the thermal interface had become a very thin grey peelable piece of peper-like material. I removed the pot from another card and found the same phenomenon.
So now i think it's better to leave the shim on the card when mounting pots. As for the thermal interface with IHS, I can't really say what happened but maybe at really low temps like -160C as I have tried on the cards, the TIM sorta changed properties after some time.