Performing Pad Change&Paste on Asus TUF RTX3090

[purecain]

Unfortunately as the title states, I just noticed my memory temps were hitting 108c in GPU-Z.

The GPU temps are fine, but the memory is insufficiently cooled imo. Ive seen a few people apply this 'upgrade' to their cooling

and the common consensus is that you save around 10% or more.

Will update with pics when everything has arrived. Ive just ordered some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 12.5W/mk with Thermalright 12.8wk 2mm.

Ive also got a pack of Arctic Cooling Thermal Pads 6.0W/mk as back up as I only have one pack of the other coming.

I'd appreciate your opinions, tips or advice if youve already completed this cooling mod.

 

[Mussels]

I did this with my 3090, but had to slap other heatsinks on top to cool the damn things... then just gave up and went custom water

 

[mtcn77]

I think it is poorly indicated, though not as dissuaded as reference cooler assemblies. You either miss the original thermal pad - if they are thermal wax - or you cannot screw it on right and overcompress the damn thing breaking vrms. It would have been better if you avoided it altogether.

 

[phanbuey]

I did this on my 3080, and it's just scary AF... (especially since i did it twice due to pads being wrong size the first time). You should be fine, but it's definitely the least fun I've ever had modding computer gear.

In any case after i finished the second time the card posted with a black screen -- some wiggling and tons of swearing fixed it though, and I have ram temps that sit in the low 80s now.

 

[purecain]

Thanks for the input, @phanbuey - I'll be going for those 80c ram temps.

 

[eidairaman1]

Unfortunately as the title states, I just noticed my memory temps were hitting 108c in GPU-Z.

The GPU temps are fine, but the memory is insufficiently cooled imo. Ive seen a few people apply this 'upgrade' to their cooling

and the common consensus is that you save around 10% or more.

Will update with pics when everything has arrived. Ive just ordered some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 12.5W/mk with Thermalright 12.8wk 2mm.

Ive also got a pack of Arctic Cooling Thermal Pads 6.0W/mk as back up as I only have one pack of the other coming.

I'd appreciate your opinions, tips or advice if youve already completed this cooling mod.

I hope you got a caliper to measure the thickness of the stock pads or a feeler gauge to determine how wide the gap is between the gpu heatsink and vrms/ram

 

[sepheronx]

I hope you got a caliper to measure the thickness of the stock pads or a feeler gauge to determine how wide the gap is between the gpu heatsink and vrms/ram

They tend to be rather standard.

The GPU memory modules next to the GPU core are 2mm till it touches the heatsink, and 3mm in the back plate. I have re-padded a few 3080's of different make/models and it seems to be the standard.

I am having to redo my 3080 vram pads coming up. The Thermalright pads are too stiff and so the temperatures are climbing again on the vram modules. So I ordered Gelid brand ones which are a lot squishier.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Ive just ordered some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 12.5W/mk with Thermalright 12.8wk 2mm.

You should be fine

I'd agree. You ordered good materials and as long as you're careful you'll be fine.

 

[purecain]

Right just performed the procedure. Recorded it for the community and my camera battery died half way through. Typical...

So I found the stock thermal pads almost dry and hard in places. The pads on the back were too big imo @ 2.5mm+(just noticed the sizes in the above post).

I replaced the pads front and back with 2.0mm Thermalright Extreme Odyssey. They were too thick for the fron and i'm going to replace again with 1.5mm pads.

I'm going to replace front and back again as my temps are the same. The GPU is 10c cooler with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

In gaming the memory temps dont exceed 90c. Mining pushes the memory up to 108-110c.

I think i'm going to try sepheronx's idea and see how the Gelid 1.5mm pads do.

@ phanbuey - You weren't wrong about how much fun the process was. What a nightmare.

 

[phanbuey]

tip - I used thermal paste on the chips and the back of the pads on my last time, and that got me a huge temp drop. The pads themselves arent a big difference.

 

[Mussels]

Paste might add that little bit of needed extra thickness, if the size is a tiny bit small, too

messy tho

 

[phanbuey]

Paste might add that little bit of needed extra thickness, if the size is a tiny bit small, too

messy tho

it adds a bit more thermal conductivity as well -- a bit of extra gooiness - definitely messy, but shaves off another 5-8C off the chips.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Mine hasn't been overheating to that extent (it's a launch date card, first batch), most I see is 90-94°C on memory junction after extended periods of time gaming (I don't mine) so I've been putting it off doing this, but as the card nears one year of use and our very harsh summer approaches i've been considering replacing the pads as well.

It seems you've already done it, but I've found this post with the exact measurements on a blog, it's worth bookmarking just in case

These pads are very expensive, so i'm looking forward to seeing which one you get the best results with, so I can do it on mine

 

[purecain]

Ok so ive researched the issue, added a 200mm fan to the top rear of my pc to help remove the hot air from the CPU Heat sink, this lowered my system temps by about 2c. No effect on the gpu and memory under mining load that is worth mentioning.

So for my next trick I'm going to replace to 2.0mm pads that were originally 3.0mm with 1.5mm pads of the same brand on the back of the card. I'm going to buy some thermal grease for the memory chips and apply the tiniest amount as I actually noticed the stock cards pads did use this. I'll make sure I can record the horror show this time, for your amusement.

Just one more thing, the main videos that are up with large temp drops are not all honest depictions of whats really going on. Check out the gpu temps under mining load, youll notice they are far too low.

I wont say which person and video's are being dishonest but lets just say there is definitely a financial gain for these companies, and that may well of lead them to over exaggerate their findings to get as many

new customers as possible.

If any Thermal Pad companies want to send me some of their pads I will try them and document the findings honestly here and on YouTube.

Just checking how the pads have compressed when the heat sink was replaced and noticed that some have hardly any contact while another has considerable indentation. It looks like there might be more to replacing these pads than I originally thought. I'll take a pic and add it up later so you can see what I mean.

 

[lexluthermiester]

a 400mm fan

Is this a typo?

 

[purecain]

Ahhh sorry yes... I meant a 200mm not 400mm. Thanks for pointing that out... fixed it.

Make sure to use 3.0mm pads on the back. There are standoffs like what you would see on a PC case for your motherboard. There isnt as much pressure on the back side ram ic's and I think this is costing

me a few degrees C.

I just took the front of the card off and everything looks to be making good contact but the back plate is bowing slightly to make up for the fact I replaced 3mm pads with 2.5mm ones. I'll correct this next week. I need to buy some 3.0mm pads now. I had originally thought that the thinner pads would of been the answer or at least help with cooler temps. That was the wrong assumption unfortunately.

If after the pad replacement the memory temp is still a limiting factor for much higher speeds and hash rates it might be a good idea for us to pool resources and have a batch of active backplates made up.
We could implement a 120mmNoctua Fan and heat pipes into the design. If anyone from Noctua see's this, I have a few ideas I wouldn't mind sharing.

 

[purecain]

How easy is it to get a hold of heat pipes to mod our own back plates. Maybe we could use convection in another way and design something unique. I'm up for the challenge though if anyone else fancies trying their hand at R&D.
The videos and advice being posted on youtube seem to be nothing more than youtubers jumping on the hype train to get hits. Theirs no real info to take away from most of them.
Ive been thinking about how we could make use of the 3mm gap the stand offs give us on the TUF. I'll research creating heat pipes and post what I find.
Right ive found some heat pipes 10x150mm and a heat pipe bender for £30. still looking. PM me if your interested in teaming up on this project.
I found these

but you have to buy a minimum of 10 which is over £1000. I may try applying the round heat pipes to top of the back plate and use the bending tool to curve the pipes up so that they
can cool, so that they are in front of and behind my cpu cooler fans.
These are on ebay @ £12.50

We could also use copper shims.

Ive never used them before, does anyone have any experience using these to cool GPU/CPU's or IC's???

This is whats been created by others for the same purpose. This is what i was thinking of creating.

Ive bought one of these and i'll post up the results as soon as it arrives. My 3.0mm and 1.5mm Thermalright pads just arrived aswell.

 

[purecain]

Please merge these posts MOD. TY!
I've taken the cards back plate off again to replace the 2.5mm pads with 3.0mm pads of the same brand and type.

I'm now getting 102-4c as my max temp which is a 8-10c improvement while mining, and it literally crawls up to that point where before the temps just shot straight up to 112c.

In gaming its no where near that, if i remember correctly the memory never gets hotter than around 75-80c. I'll see how high it get tonight. Very happy im starting to see an improvement though.

 

[purecain]

I just got the heat sink below in the mail.

I tried just placing it on top of the back plate without any pads to see if it made much of a difference. I had the fins coming up between the CPU cooler and the rear exhaust fan.

It seemed to help the memory keep cooler for longer, although once heated up become hot and needs the dedicated fan that came with it installing.

Unfortunately for me I need to take the card apart once more to make sure the memory chips on the front of the card are making proper contact. I suspect thats where my problem is.

The backplate is making perfect contact now, so hopefully adding a .5mm pad on top of the 2.0mm pads will be enough to make perfect contact.

Without causing the internal heatsink to not have enough pressure on the GPU die and cause the GPU to over heat.

Will update over the next couple of days.

 

[ThaiTaffy]

Looks like a well engineered ghetto mod

 

[purecain]

Thats what I thought when it arrived like this...

Obviously had a rough journey... ^^ I'll send the seller a message and see if he'll replace it.

Ive bent it back into shape for now. The design is good for a -2c drop in memory temperatures with its own dedicated fan.

I'll place a large thermal pad between the backplate and the heatsink tomorrow and see if theres any improvement

including adding a dedicated HSF.

Like I put previously, I suspect the internal HSF which contacts the CPU and memory isn't making proper contact with the thermal pads. There was hardly any imprint the last time I checked.

I'm still trying to get the memory down to low 90's under mining load. Cheers!!!

 

[lexluthermiester]

Thats what I thought when it arrived like this...

Dude, that is unacceptable...

Obviously had a rough journey...

And it wasn't packed very well. They needed to use bubble-wrap not card-board. Seriously? Who does that?..

I'll send the seller a message and see if he'll replace it.

And if they don't, demand a refund.

 

[purecain]

Dude, that is unacceptable...

And it wasn't lacked very well. They needed to use bubble-wrap not card-board. Seriously? Who does that?..

And if they don't, demand a refund.

I will be doing, I was worried about the pipes cracking. You can usually kink metal, once but bend it after that in the exact same place and you get cracks.

I'll update what the seller has to say about it, the actual delivery was quite quick. Definitely inadequately packed though.

 

[Ferd]

I just got the heat sink below in the mail.

I tried just placing it on top of the back plate without any pads to see if it made much of a difference. I had the fins coming up between the CPU cooler and the rear exhaust fan.

It seemed to help the memory keep cooler for longer, although once heated up become hot and needs the dedicated fan that came with it installing.

Unfortunately for me I need to take the card apart once more to make sure the memory chips on the front of the card are making proper contact. I suspect thats where my problem is.

The backplate is making perfect contact now, so hopefully adding a .5mm pad on top of the 2.0mm pads will be enough to make perfect contact.

Without causing the internal heatsink to not have enough pressure on the GPU die and cause the GPU to over heat.

Will update over the next couple of days.


View attachment 218058

Hi
How and where is this supposed to be mounted ?
on top of the backplate ,? Or you remove the backplate and put this instead?
Does it any mounting mechanism? Since it’s supposed to be used with thermal pads does it provide a good pressure to compress the pads ?
Lol so many questions, I just didn’t understand how it’s supposed to work looking at those pictures

 

[Mussels]

2-3C drop means its not doing anything for sure

check out those pads, make sure nothing is too tall and pushing them away... the thickness really does need to be stupidly precice and sometimes thermal paste for that extra 0.1mm is the right call