One of my reference 5970's had been running hot with high fans to keep >72C so I decided to try my hand at replacing the (factory?) thermal grease with some of the good stuff recommended on many posts here. After unscrewing all screws I could find and trying to understand how to get the cooler off, a little pressure and pop, they split rather suddenly leaving me with this:
The gray stuff was thick (at least 1mm) and messy, spilling well over the edges of the actual GPU chips themselves. The cooler had some residue also:
I went about cleaning it with the 2 part arctic dissolve and clean solutions starting with part 1 to get the old junk up:
messy, took a lot of paper towels/coffee filters and time. Finally got it looking like:
There is still a bit of residue on the around the resistors near the GPUs, but I'll get them when I apply part 2 of the cleaning product. The cooler now looks like:
I'm concerned about the condition of the thermal pads. I drew 2nd-grader circles around the two I'm really concerned about. Are these salvageable?
It's late here so I'll finish this tomorrow. Any help greatly appreciated.
The gray stuff was thick (at least 1mm) and messy, spilling well over the edges of the actual GPU chips themselves. The cooler had some residue also:
I went about cleaning it with the 2 part arctic dissolve and clean solutions starting with part 1 to get the old junk up:
messy, took a lot of paper towels/coffee filters and time. Finally got it looking like:
There is still a bit of residue on the around the resistors near the GPUs, but I'll get them when I apply part 2 of the cleaning product. The cooler now looks like:
I'm concerned about the condition of the thermal pads. I drew 2nd-grader circles around the two I'm really concerned about. Are these salvageable?
It's late here so I'll finish this tomorrow. Any help greatly appreciated.