Hey Bit-techer's, Right so I bought one of these GTX 580's refurbished from Scan: Note the lack of contact between half the GPU and the cooler and the lack of cooling to the VRM's and memory. Now the cooler is appalling as seen here: So the plan is to use a reference cooler from a GTX 570 as what I can tell both the 570 and 580 PCB are exactly the same therefore the cooler should fit according to the Bit-tech review. I've got the right Torx screwdriver, only question I do have is am I okay to use standard TIM on the VRMs, memory modules etc instead of using thermal pads or should I grab some? Any other problems I might face or suggestions? Many thanks, Isitari.
I think the point of thermal pads is to allow for mechanical variances in the chip and heatsink. The likes of VRMS and memory modules aren't surrounded by screws to pull the heats sink down on to them in the same way as a gpu core or a cpu. That being said if you used a small amount of non conductive thermal paste you are definitely in no worse a position as you were with the other cooler. If it were me though I would just pick up some thermal pads. You can probably get them on ebay with reasonable shipping.
What temps do the vrms get to with the EVGA cooler? Has the benefit of a fan directly cooling them unlike the blower style, might not be much worse.
Anyway of me measuring the VRM temperature without directly attaching a thermometer to them as I can't see them on any temperature measurement software? Regarding the cooler, it's just shockingly bad, if it gets pushed hard (Witcher 2 with ubersampling) the GPU hits 90C, this is with a fan in the side of the case directly removing the waste heat (tried both orientations), an Antec 900 case with the intake fans set to medium and this is all with it being massively undervolted! It hits the thermal limit without all this Oh and of course dumps all this heat into my PSU...
Yeah thats pretty lame temperatures, don't expect the stock coolers to be much better though! For the 400/500 series they get toasty too.
