I recently removed the shroud and heat sink from my son’s GPU so I could paint the shroud. It’s an older card, figured it’d give me an excuse to replace his thermal paste while I was there. When I took the heat sink off, this was under the thermal pad. The pad also had some browning (from heat, I’m guessing) and some black, moldy looking stuff under it.
Can someone please tell me what these are, and what effect this one being messed up will have? The card has seemed to work fine, so it’s at least not a binary it works/it doesn’t work thing.
That is (or was) a MOSFET. Basically it is a solid state relay.
The given power stage operates at 1/2 power now. As the cards seems to have 2 mosfets for each inductor (the grey blocks), it should not affect the card too much.
Looking at the picture, it got too hot and shorted with a bang.
While replacing is possible, it is more likely to make it worse.
Thanks for the response. It’s a little hard to tell in the photo, but the one immediately below that one is also compromised - the top is “hinged” a little, and could be pulled off easily.
When you say replaying, you mean further usage? I’m guessing the card will continue to work, until it doesn’t?
What exact card am I looking at?
Meant replacing, I just suck at typing.
And yes, the card will probably live a normal life, expect an earlier than expected death in 3 or more years.
It’s a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 4GB WINDFORCE, link.
There’s a good PC shop in my area that can replace things like this, but you don’t think it’d be worth it?
Not sure.
If the shop gives you a quote on the repair, then you can use that as a budget for a used one.
1 Like
A powerphase allways consists of a minimum of 2 mosfets a highside and a low side fet.
A powerstage basiclly contains a highside and lowside fet in one package.
1 Like