Heatsink contact and pressure

S

Silent.Sin

Gawd
Joined
Jun 23, 2003
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969
I've noticed that my 3850 512 (dual slot cooler) has been artifacting more than it used to in some of the more demanding games without the ambient temp changing at all. Enough to make me wonder if it would do me some good to remount the heatsink with some better TIM.

I've seen at least one article that I can't seem to find again that had a few tricks outlined in order to get better heatsink contact via increased pressure. I think they used pieces of zip tie stuck in-between the backside mounting bracket and the PCB to sort of "pull" the top side (chip-side) closer.

Does anyone here have any experience using a bit of hackery to get these heatsinks fastened a little tighter to the board without the need for a remount job? The heatsink uses pads to interface with the memory chips so these would benefit especially from any added pressure that can be applied. Would strapping ordinary zip ties around the whole shebang do the trick? What about the trick I mentioned above? Thanks for any advice.
 
Well no, this is in an overclocked situation I should have mentioned that earlier. The artifacts only seem to appear in games that really stress my system, though. The rate at which these artifacts happen has definitely increased since first installation. I've gone ahead and relaxed the core and memory overclock down 25MHz and all of the issues have stopped. However, I have changed nothing else and the ambient temp has not changed more than a degree or so. Seems to me like I shouldn't have to relax timings on a chip that's less than 4 months old when the conditions are the same in order to get it to play at its previous levels of stability.

EDIT: Before you ask, I keep my case well dusted.
 
Overclocking isn't guaranteed, it seems like you have a card that won't. If the card you have runs fine at stock then I guess that's what you'll have to do.

That being said, if you want to remove the heatsink and add your own thermal paste/whatever then don't let me stop you. It might not make much of a difference though. Making the heatsink 'tighter' then what it is may actually damage components on the PCB, so I'd be careful with that.
 
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