Fallen Kell wrote:
Redid the thermal pasting today and popped on Red Dead again to test. Wow what a difference. I want to do another test tomorrow because I want to make sure the fan is actually working because it was so quiet! It never once even raised the speed above the idle (but I only played for 5 minutes). I even stuck my head right next to it, and the hard drive was louder than the fan. I could feel air at the back, so I know it was working....
So I wanted to pass this tidbit on to everyone else who is contemplating this. Get thermal paste which is non-conductive (very important!!!), and use a lot more than you think you should. Trust me on this, it isn't like a CPU heatsink as there can be a pretty significant gap between the heatsinks and the GPU and CPU. When I removed the heatsink and looked at my previous attempt, there was only a very small portion of the heatsinks which made contact with the thermal paste on the previous attempt (in which I used the more advanced method of using a very thin layer that you hand spread across the CPU/GPU surface, which is the preferred method for modern CPUs, assuming you know how to properly place the heatsink on top without creating air bubbles/pockets). The fact that there was so little paste on the heatsink when I removed it, shows that there is a pretty significant gap, so I went with the old school, put a huge glop in the middle and when you press the heatsink down, it will force the paste to spread out from the middle (with excess spilling over the sides, which is why you need non-conductive paste to do this). Again, it seems to have made a SIGNIFICANT difference so far, but I want to do a little more testing (get some real play time on it).
So I applied new thermal paste to mine today.... Worked great for the first hour of watching Breaking Bad on blu-ray. I don't think the fan came on at all in the first 20 minutes, then it kicked in on low. By the time I was partway into the 2nd episode it was back up to high.
I don't know if I didn't use enough paste or it's performing normally..... Tearing it apart wasn't really that bad, except I broke a bit of one of the plastic ribbon holders. It still works just fine, but I don't want to be tearing it apart anymore than I have to.
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- Oh, great. You killed the invisible swordsman!
-- He's dead, all right.
--- How was I supposed to know where he was?
- You were supposed to fire up. _We_ both fired _up_.
