Is it worth it to swap out the thermal paste on my 7950? My 1440p monitor is on the way and I'm doing everything to prepare (nice cleaning, new chair, and thermal paste). Is the stock paste on the twin frozr 3 okay or should I throw some new stuff on? I'll probably do the heat sinks on the mobo while I'm at it...
I have a full tube of Noctua NT-H1 paste on hand but I have never re-seated a GPU heat sink and would love the experience.
Could be; if anything, they usedtoo much, so, rather than seeing an increase in cooling due to the quality of the paste, you would see an increase because of the amount of paste.
Replace it, Every heatsink cooling solution I've seen from a graphics card PCB manufacturer has pre-applied thermal compound to the heatsink before assembling the card and packaging for shipping. Almost always there is too much thermal compound on the heatsink even though it is pre-applied and squeezes out over the edges of the GPU die.
Well I finished and all is well. Did the motherboard too, one of the heatsinks on it had a rubber pad on it and no paste so I just left that one alone (990fxa-ud3, vertical heatsink by cpu). Temps seem to be 2c lower all around at idle, thanks for the tips!
Void the warranty? Are fucking mental? Do you even realize that they can't tell if you've taken the heatsink off? The only thing that voids a graphics card warranty is if you rip the serial number sticker off the back of the PCB or you literally catch fire to the PCB causing it to discolor from overheating.
There is a little sticker on top of one of the screws that holds the pcb to the heatsink on the twin frozr III. Taking off the heatsink requires puncturing the sticker.
Never heard of a heatgun and a knife? It's people who think like you do that make it "illegal" to fix factory garbage that slips the average consumer.
I found out that ASUS purposefully designed a flaw in their Cooler design for the HD 7870 DCII v2 graphics card to allow the Digital VRM to overheat if you overclock the GPU too high causing instability. Virtually limiting your overclock.
Batojiri, In that circumstance yes, it's totally worth modding the cooling. However, this topic is not about Asus DCII. It's about an MSI Twin Frozr 7950. There is nothing wrong with most of the Twin Frozrs out there thermally. I was simply saying that it's not worth voiding a warranty for a few degree Celsius.
Yep the exact same techniques are used in cars creating vortexes in the intake and exhaust robbing horse power. It's just sad how efficient companies are at ripping us off.