Hey SoF,
The issue you discribe isnt really new. Me and elmor experienced the same when pretesting 480 Lightning before MOA 2010 finals. We're using OCZ Freeze thermalpaste. It's conductivity seems great, until around -160 when it suddently freezes and cracks. Here's some data about that: link
one workaround would be to contestly bench and not stay in idle for long, so even with the VGA pot filled the GPU itself will not get any colder than -160. Or when things crash and you may need to reboot and such ... always keep high voltage applied. VID mod with +400 like elmor and kinc posted should work great i would imagine. At the time when running Lightning, we didnt do any such mods, and had do keep stuff warm with heatguns.
So when hearing that crack, you'd definitly have to back off and let the card and thermalpaste heat up a bit. Then things should be just fine
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks