I got tired of my 280 gtx's VRMS hitting such high temps (85-90 while gaming). So I decided to pull my videocard and see what I could do about it. I unscrewed the block from the card, leaving the water cooling system intact, and proceeded to take off the Un-Sink to see how those thermal pads were looking.
What I noticed was the one pad that covered the chip, was intended a lot. The memory chips pads were slightly intended. And the vrms pads had no intends, to very little... looking like they weren't making too good of contact.
So as I was looking at the heat sink, trying to think how I can make it have better contact I noticed how the screw holes were positioned; that I could cut the heatsink in 3 separate parts, one part for each section (that chip, the ram, and the vrms).
So I used a hacksaw to cut it nicely into 3 parts. The blade fit nicely between the prongs of the heat sink, making it very easy to cut perfectly straight lines.
I didn't take any pics, but this is basically how i cut the heatsink:
This allowed me to do away with the thermal pads, and use thermal paste instead; as the 3 different sections of the card (ram, that chip, and vrms) are at different heights... but with the heatsink in sections now, I was able to use paste since each section sat flush.
Since the vrm section is separate now; I did some further modding to the vrm section, putting paste on, pulling sink off, see how they made contacts. There's basicall 3 rows of vrms, 3, 3, 1. On my card, the 3 front, and 1 on the back made good contact, while the middle row wasn't too good. So I took out a nice flat file, and adjusted the 3 front, and 1 end, along with the built in stand offs until I got everything nice.
before, if i used the OCCT gpu test, my vrms would hit over 100 in like 45 seconds. Now it takes over 5 minutes to reach 100, and climbs there very slowing. And I can feel the vrm section of the sink, it's pretty damn hot!... but now that is is independent, it's not heating my ram chips to such high temps anymore
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