First post, by shamino
- Rank
- l33t
I recently took apart my PNY GTX260-216 card to clean dust out of it. As far as I can tell from pictures online, the PNY cooler is the common generic design for that family of cards.
I have found that apparently, the GPU chip doesn't actually make contact with the heatsink. When I tried applying a thin layer of thermal paste, the card ran surprisingly hot. When I took the card back apart, I found that the paste on the GPU had never transferred to the copper on the heatsink side.
When I added a thick bead of paste and test fitted it, the bead only flattened a bit, but it didn't spread out very far at all. I had to add a lot of paste to fill the gap. The cooling improved after that was done, but I don't find the situation satisfying.
The RAM chips have that spongy thermal tape on them. The tape shows indentations from the RAM chips, so they are definitely making contact.
I had this card apart once before a long time ago. Perhaps the GPU originally had a thick thermal pad on it that I scraped off, but I don't remember that.
Does anybody know if a GTX260 or it's siblings typically had a thick thermal pad on the GPU? Is that why my clearances are screwed up?
I'm thinking about filing down the mounting posts on the heatsink so it sits flush to the GPU, but I'm not sure if that will create a new problem with clearances to the RAM.