I can't find a pic of the shroud, but it's not the classic 285 one. Doesn't have the "step". I don't know the vendor yet as the sticker might've been removed. Will send a picture shortly.

Well, let's see if the truth can be handled... thermal compound isn't some magic filler putty, it is actually a terrible conductor of heat. However, it is many times better a conductor of heat as air, and other random substances you might think of putting in, like play doh or starch paste. But compared to metals, even the worst, it sucks..... so it's not a gap filler. Some pastes can have high conductivity values, but have a thick consistency, thus underperform vs something that spreads thinner but doesn't have numbers half as good, because it achieves a layer a quarter the thickness of the other one.

So anyway, where cooling critical, almost any metal shim is better than relying on only thermal compound, cut up a soda can, the critical thing though is not to make it oversize and lift the sink off somewhere else. Even though thermal compound is bad, maybe filling only half the gap with metal is probably better thermal inteface than the pads can do, and it was thaaat critical it wouldn't use a pad. The pads across a bulk space probably do a bit better than paste, due to being able to arrange thermal conductivity axes up and down and not have to be good in random directions or have filler oils/greases to spread well ... but they're still not "good".

Blower fans kind of suck because of noise and because they heatsinks clog from hair and dust over time.

The units I buy get taken apart and washed and the heat pads are replaced if needed plus the heatsink compound is cleaned, and a new application is applied.

Heatsink compound is only used for filling in air gaps because any metal surface isn't 100 flat or pit free. There is a product out there called Thermal Grizzly Carbonaut that is a small sheet of graphite and it can be reused (GPU or CPU not for RAM chips.

95% of the dust on heatsinks like this all gather at the entrance and can be brushed off with an unused dry paintbrush/toothbrush, the 5% remaining dust inside is not too big of a deal.

Most laptops use heatsinks like this. It's inexpensive and works well, but dust does build up.

Thermal pads are best for RAM. Eg. ThermalRight Extreme Odessey

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-02, 04:31:

Well, let's see if the truth can be handled... thermal compound isn't some magic filler putty, it is actually a terrible conductor of heat. However, it is many times better a conductor of heat as air, and other random substances you might think of putting in, like play doh or starch paste. But compared to metals, even the worst, it sucks..... so it's not a gap filler. Some pastes can have high conductivity values, but have a thick consistency, thus underperform vs something that spreads thinner but doesn't have numbers half as good, because it achieves a layer a quarter the thickness of the other one.

So anyway, where cooling critical, almost any metal shim is better than relying on only thermal compound, cut up a soda can, the critical thing though is not to make it oversize and lift the sink off somewhere else. Even though thermal compound is bad, maybe filling only half the gap with metal is probably better thermal inteface than the pads can do, and it was thaaat critical it wouldn't use a pad. The pads across a bulk space probably do a bit better than paste, due to being able to arrange thermal conductivity axes up and down and not have to be good in random directions or have filler oils/greases to spread well ... but they're still not "good".

That's true, but there are tests out there that say that shims actually transfer heat too much, which in turn will make the gpu core run hotter. So the question is, is thick paste like mx4 or mx6 similar in perf to the stock pads?

One of my GTX 580 died of this. Dust and cat hair blocking the heatsink, and since I was using it in a compute system without screen I didn't notice until the card wasn't recognized by the driver anymore. Doesn't produce any image anymore either. When I noticed I saw the collection of dust. This combined with the sustained load was probably too much. I still have the card, maybe I try a repair attempt some day.

Meh, I block the fan from spinning and put a Vacuum cleaner hose to it - sucks all the bunnies out in seconds and doesnt make a mess.

I would hardly call this heatsink / shroud design "the worst ever".

Yes, it would be better if the shroud and fan is made to be removable without taking the entire heatsink off. But overall, I don't find this a big minus. With hot cards that tend to also clog with dust, I find that removing the heatsink is a good exercise in checking if the thermal paste on the GPU is still OK. Moreover, if the card has never been cleaned before and the heatsink looks pretty clogged, I remove it to give it a wash. That's the only sure way to restore the heatsink back to 100% (or nearly) factory performance.

What I don't like about this heatsink / cooler is... well, nothing. It's pretty good. Its only problem is that it's too small for the TDP of the card. The GTX285 is a 200 Watt beast. But this cooler is likely not capable of handling more than 100 Watts. Well, OK, surely it can handle much more than 100W (otherwise, how does a 200W TDP card even work with it in the first place, right?), but it's at the expense of higher temperatures. 70-80C under load OK for you? nVidia surely says it's fine... but of course they would - it's in their interest to sell you another card when this one bites the dust (literally) quicker than it would otherwise with a properly-sized cooler. This cooler/heatsink is sized just large enough to pass the warranty period, and then a bit more at the grace of the silicon lottery Gods. 5 years is usually the target life cycle, as that's more or less the average frequency at which people upgrade and/or keep a system. Beyond that, no company really cares to make the product better, because it brings them no extra value. If anything, it saves them a lot of money to make the cooler as small as possible (but just "enough" for the card to work long enough.)

Don't believe me with any of that? OK then, stick that "200W-capable" cooler from this GPU onto a 200W TDP CPU and see how it fares.

I always find it funny how people (used to) competely panic and re-do their system cooling when their CPU ran past 60C, yet would not bat an eye lash when their GPU was operating 80+C under load (at least back in the days... today, it all seems to run at 100C and be considered "OK" because... manufacturers say it's OK to think so.)

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

And even if you do that, you still can't fully dedust it, because the fins are "closed" at the top.

That's actually a clever trick to get more surface area (to be able to dissipate more heat) crammed into less space. So it's not a bad thing.
Really, the design of this cooler is actually pretty damn good for what it is / the size it is.
But again, it's just too small to handle 200W TDP continuously (GPU at 100% load) while keeping the temperatures low (50-55C max would be nice for a long GPU life.)

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

I had to put the heatsink through running water to finally get the dust out.

Meh.
I do that with just about every GPU that I buy used, as most come pretty filthy and clogged with dust (... then again, I tend to go for the cheaper used ones, so I do get what I pay for... usually. 😁 )

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

So this card likely ran very hot for a long time given the amount of dust. No wonder these cards keep breaking.

No, it ran hot because the heatsink is not adequate to handle 200W TDP and also because the stock fan profile is usually set to be more silent to keep the card quiet. Otherwise, review sites tend to complain, and that makes product X "not-so-highly-recommended".
Yes, the dust is not helping anything. But the temperature monitoring of the GPU will ramp up the fan as needed to keep the temperatures in the targeted cooling profile. So technically the dust is not really why these GPUs die, even when they do look pretty clogged up.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

I guess I am not actually asking anything in this thread. I am just sharing my frustration with the world.

You and I both. 😉
In my case, I just hate how many corners GPU vendors cut in order to save on costs, particularly with the size of the cooler, as that's easily 1/3 the value of the card, realistically speaking in terms of material resources. There's very few "stock" coolers that I've approved of over the years. And most of the time, even if the cooler / heatsink size was up to proper size to handle the TDP, the manufacturer would still dumb-down the fan profile too much to make it very silent, resulting again in a hot-running GPU chip. But at least for those, I can just tweak the fan profile (or just plain-straight hardwire it to more sane levels) to make the card cool better.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

And I am wondering if you folks ever encountered GPU fans that are even worse than this.

Oh... plenty.
The worst one was on a Leadtek Winfast GeForce 8600 GT card. It had what looked like a not-too-terrible -sized cooler on it, and it even had a heat pipe in it. But when I took it apart for a cleaning, I found out that it was all a bad joke (or perhaps designed by someone with ZERO experience in thermodynamics): the heat pipe was coupled to the GPU die through a thick layers of thermal paste (read: poor heat conduction) and a thin piece of aluminum, also coupled with more thermal paste to the GPU die. Aaand, the heat pipe was couple to the rest of the heatsink with more thick layer of thermal paste that wasn't even applied properly (read: missing) on most parts. So the thermal performance of that otherwise no-so-terrible looking cooler was actually dismal. Needless to say, I ditched it without a 2nd thought. Perhaps I'll get to posting it on Vogons some day. I have most of the pictures too.

Other notable contenders include a Medion Radeon 9800 XL with a tiny cooler with an even tinier 35 mm fan. SERIOUSLY?! - A 40+ Watt TDP GPU with a cooler fit for a Radeon 9200 / 9600 (~10 Watts)? No wonder the card became artifact-galore early in its life. Regular stock Radeon 9700/9800 coolers look adequate compared to it (and yet, we all know they actually weren't either.)

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-02, 03:59:

Actually..... I do have a question... can I just use thermal paste (non conductive) for rams on the GPU? I don't see why not. It's not a lot of height to cover, maybe 1mm tops.

Just re-use the old thermal pads, even if they are a little crushed / disintegrated, with a small amount of thermal paste to "fill in" the cracks / dips.
I've done that plenty of times before. It's about as good as stock.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-02, 04:31:

Even though thermal compound is bad, maybe filling only half the gap with metal is probably better thermal inteface than the pads can do, and it was thaaat critical it wouldn't use a pad.

+1
Indeed if it was something critical, a thermal pad wouldn't be used.
The truth is that the TDP of RAM chips isn't that high (maybe 1 Watts per chip, tops, even for the very high-end and hot-running chips.) Also, most of the cooling of the RAM chips happens through their BGA pads and is passed down onto the PCB. The problem is when the PCB temperature "saturates" with too much heat, the thermal pad -coupled RAM does eventually start to conduct some of the heat away to the GPU heatsink. But it's really a 2-way street. When the RAM is running cooler than the GPU, some of the heat from the GPU heatsink also flows via the RAM thermal pads and back to the PCB.
So essentially, all of the components on the whole card run with a more uniform temperature. Depending on the components and the GPU cooler design, that may or may not be a desirable thing, though.

MikeSG wrote on 2024-07-02, 11:22:

95% of the dust on heatsinks like this all gather at the entrance and can be brushed off with an unused dry paintbrush/toothbrush, the 5% remaining dust inside is not too big of a deal.

+1

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-07-06, 21:58:

Meh, I block the fan from spinning and put a Vacuum cleaner hose to it - sucks all the bunnies out in seconds and doesnt make a mess.

+1
This is usually a GOOD ENOUGH method for most people to clean their hardware.
I always prefer to take the extra step, though (take apart and fully disassemble to clean/wash), particularly if the hardware was purchased online / 2nd hand and looks dirty. Once I deep-clean it, it's just light cleaning from that point forward - typically with the vacuum cleaner and brush attachment like you do, or just with a paint brush to throw the dust around.

Do I have to mention cooling a 90nm Xbox 360 GPU (aka Radeon X1800/1900) with a copper-less heatsink is a big no-no?

PcBytes wrote on 2024-07-10, 01:39:

Do I have to mention cooling a 90nm Xbox 360 GPU (aka Radeon X1800/1900) with a copper-less heatsink is a big no-no?

Ah yes, those old Xbox 360's and their piss-poor cooling design. Microsoft ought to be awarded for it, really.
I always scrapped them with a smile on my face. Lots of good caps and MOSFETs to re-use, among other components.

That said, if anyone has one and wants to alleviate the poor cooling somewhat better, the single copper-piped HS for the GPU still isn't an adequate solution. It probably help dissipate no more than 10 Watts extra, if even that much. There's just not enough air movement inside the box and the 2nd radiator on the heat pipe is just too small to make a difference.
The more proper way to fix those 360's is to get a 2nd one... or just the CPU cooler from one (doesn't matter if it's the all-aluminum one or the copper-piped one), take out the optical drive, and install this 2nd CPU cooler onto the GPU. Of course, fan shroud needs to be deleted and new duct made to suck air through both HSes. The finally do one of them JTAG mods and put all the games on a large HDD, so that way the optical can be deleted out of the system too.
The result is an Xbox 360 that runs cooler, has all the games on the HDD, and it's just how it really should have shipped out.

The previous owner cleaned the entrance of the fins entrance, multiple times, like you folks are saying, and called it a day. But he failed to notice the dust that was deeper inside the heatsink.

Between the fins it was all packed full of dense dust, even slightly humid, the entire length of the heatsink. Almost no air was coming out of the back of the case.The card ran hot because the heatsink was full of dust, but more generally because the heatsink is trash. You say it's undersized, I say it's trash. Because it can't be cleaned trivially. I was lucky to never have owned bad blower fans. I've had a x800 and a 4870 ages ago but both were transparent and easy to see when dust was clogging. Otherwise I must have been lucky to have accidentally bought only cards with fans in this configuration.....

.... that are very easy to clean even without taking apart the heatsink. Never had a problem. Believe it or not, not everyone who owns a computer and play games loves to spend hours washing the heatsink in an actual sink like you..... just to realize they need to order memory pads that are half a millimeter shorter to complete the work at all.

Also you say that they put some planned obsolescence design in the poor heatsink, but you find impossible that they made maintenance hard on purpose? I say it's totally intentional. Like the 1$ fans they put on 1000$ gpus. and that always fail after a couple of years.