Quote Originally Posted by jbrukardt View Post
I had a big problem doing this. Per usual, evga uses about a pound of thermal grease on all the chipsets. I cleaned that off, nicely AS5ed all of em, and reattached the heatpipe assembly. The damned heatsinks dont touch the nb/sb without a massive layer of AS5........

So i proceed to shave down the little rubber spacers, and even though i only took half a mm or less off of them, apparently that was a much needed half mm. The board shorted out and got a permanent 1d error.

ARGH

Irritated at EVGA for having a halfassed solution of just globbing on more thermal grease to fill a rather large gap between the ICs and the heatpipe assembly

wow your smart... ever heard of electrical tape?

also, put ceramique on the mosfets not AS5, AS5 is capacitive. AS5 can go on NB and SB provided you isolate the rest of the green PCB with electrical tape to cover the resistors all around the 2 dice. There are also some resistors on the board itself that will touch the heatsink if you remove the rubber spacers, you need to cover those up too.

running 400x10 right now with 1.45v set in bios, 1.42v idle, 1.35v at small FFT load. be aware if you do the mod, vdroop is important, and it is especially important with crappy boards like these. there is a reason why vdroop is a whole 0.1v, it is tuned that way because the voltage regulation on these boards is garbage. the mosfets have as much as 0.1v of oscillation, so doing the mod and setting the voltage to 1.35 isn't going to earn you much. right when the load starts, the voltage will dip to 1.25, and then stabilize at 1.35v, and when going from load to idle, it will jump to 1.45v, and then stabilize at 1.35v. this takes milliseconds obviously, not enough for you or any software to measure, but in those milliseconds your cpu can crash. so be careful what you do, vdroop is important, don't get rid of it. if you need higher load voltage, just increase vcore in the bios.