Just use 90% or greater rubbing alcohol and just give it a soak for like an hour then the crap will come off. I do this when ever I get a 3DFX V3 or newer or TNT on up and it works well to clean up the old thermal epoxy.

nforce4max wrote:

Just use 90% or greater rubbing alcohol and just give it a soak for like an hour then the crap will come off. I do this when ever I get a 3DFX V3 or newer or TNT on up and it works well to clean up the old thermal epoxy.

But how do you keep it soaked for an hour? Doesn't the rubbing alcohol evaporate too quickly?

borgie83 wrote:

So I've got 3 diamond viper v770u (tnt2 ultra) graphics cards. Problem is that these cards have really noisy fans. All 3 of them! Instead of adding oil to quieten them down I decided to rip the fans off to add some aftermarket coolers. This is where my dilemma is. The thermal glue that diamond uses is hard as a rock. You'd almost have to chisel it off which I'm obviously not going to do. Any idea on how to remove this without causing damage?

Here's a photo:

Last time I encountered some hardened thermal paste, I used a plastic guitar pick to scrape it off. Didn't seem to hurt the heat spreader.

Also, good luck with the aftermarket coolers. None of them seem to come with the standard 2-pin fan connector. (Unless you're going passive, then that's obviously not an issue.)

Tetrium wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

Just use 90% or greater rubbing alcohol and just give it a soak for like an hour then the crap will come off. I do this when ever I get a 3DFX V3 or newer or TNT on up and it works well to clean up the old thermal epoxy.

But how do you keep it soaked for an hour? Doesn't the rubbing alcohol evaporate too quickly?

Not when it is in a tupperware 😎

Makes that old crap epoxy shrivel up faster than ones health care after "Obamacare".

Cool guys, I'll be sure to try this out tomorrow.

Btw, could anyone recommend a good thermal tape or similar to stick a copper heatsink+fan on once I'm done cleaning this crap off? There is no mounting holes unfortunately.

Don't bother with thermal tape and the good stuff from 3M is very expensive so just use a little epoxy on two corners with normal compound in the middle.

nforce4max wrote:

Don't bother with thermal tape and the good stuff from 3M is very expensive so just use a little epoxy on two corners with normal compound in the middle.

Did this with the memory chips on a GeForce256 DDR back in the days. Worked a treat for some extra overclocking.

Get a sharp utility knife (boxcutter, stanley knife, etc) and slowly scrape the epoxy off. When there's only a minimal amount left, use rubbing alcohol or nailpolish remover on a cotton swab or something like that. Keep rubbing and it'll come off.

The best thing to use to remove thermal paste is a non polar solvent like naptha(aka zippo fluid).