Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo KILLED my RX580 One could kill your card too

[Melona]

Below is the letter I wrote to Arctic about the Product Accelero Twin Turbo III if you have one of these a strongly suggest you check your Blue Thermal Pads to be sure your card is not killed the same way mine was.

If you did not install the back heat sink this will not apply to you and the product seems to work perfectly until the following happened. They have yet to follow up with me and I will keep you posted.

 

TL;DR the thick thermal pads leaked a sort of fluid on to my card wetting it and causing it to short out. I hope they handle this. I am very upset and my Gaming PC is down until I buy a new GPU.

Their cheaper fans seem to preform pretty close to the level of equivalent be quiet! and Noctua at a much lower cost and their higher end fans are pretty (IMO) so im not hating on them but this product cost me my videocard which is bad. I bought this card in 2016 at the height of Crypto mining and it cost almost $400. The MSI Armor fans sounded like a jet taking off which is why i chose this product. It was installed and worked for 90ish days.

 

The letter is as follows:

 

"On Jan 6th (2020) I purchased a Accelero Twin Turbo III And received it about a week later and installed it as per directions onto my MSI Armor RX580 8GB Everything was quiet and running smoother than ever.

 

I purchased a 5 pack of Arctic p120 PWM fans and 2 more Arctic BioniX P120  for other computers I was building because I liked your products so much, I was impressed. I build many systems a year for others.

 

On May 8th my MSI RX580 failed while running Chitubox 3d printing slicing software,which is a very light 3D application. After many tries to restart I put a different Gigabyte RX580 in its place and it booted right up and ran the same Chitubox software with ease. This brings me to today and why I'm writing.

 

I decided it was time to take the Artic Accelero Twin Turbo III (we will call it ATT3 from here) cooler off. I found something rather odd and unexpected.The thermal pads that interface the rear side of the VRM's has leaked a sort of greasy wet onto the RX580 and and heat spreader, each of them bleed this fluid onto the board so badly it caused the board to short out, causing the few hundred dollar issue.
My video card sits vertically in my Deepcool Tristellar case and this fluid was also found dripping down the PCB board and pooling toward the bottom where the main VRM row sits. This liquid was also found between the plastic shield and the VRMs heat spreader.

I feel very ill about this happening. I paid US $48.93 for the ATT3 the MSI RX580 that sells for 189.99 today I paid more for it when purchased because of the Crypto mining craze. and had to buy another video card as a replacement to the Rx580 since the Gigabyte is for another persons system that is waiting on parts.

For the understanding, Im a bit beyond hobby building PC's and avid gaming ,I'm 47 and have been system building since I was 23 in the days of Cyrix 686's and Voodoo video cards alot has changed since then but one thing i think we can all agree on is you don't want any part of your system Wet except the inside of a watercooler which i dont use for the very implications that they can leak.  I have pictures of all of this. Please let me know something on this."

 

As you can see from the included pictures its very wet and this is after its been sitting off for a few days while waiting for another videocard. Anyone else experience anything like this?

BTW i live in Florida and my PC sits atop a pedestal behind my large monitor in a corner where it would be impossible to get wet. my Tristellar is run without the shell over the videocard and the right shell has large opening cut to allow tons of air to pass my mainboard. While the power supply and HD dock side is left stock.

System make up:

 

Ryzen 5 2600,

WD M.2 Black 1TB w/o cooler (the board has a cooler fin for it)

3 different WD HHD's equaling 12 TB of additional storage and back ups

Noctua low profile CPU cooler

be quiet 120mm system fan

Gigabyte B450 Arorus I WIFI Micro ITX

G.skill ram 3000mhz speed, no RGB, dont remember exact modules

Phanteks Neon RGB 400mmX4 lighting the front of the case.

Seasonic gold+ 700 semi modular

Gamestorm/Deepcool Tristeller case which has been modded to be mostly open air especially the GPU and sits high up on over my monitor.

 

 Yes I post this here which is a more detailed account of how I figured out it was the video card.

Sorry this post is so long!

 

[Dravinian]

Thanks for posting the warning, had no intention of using it, had never heard of it, but it is good that this information is being shared.

[vong]

You sure it was from the fluid? I had a evga 1080 Ti SC2 and the thermal pads on those leaked way more than yours and the card never died.

[SkyHound0202]

The oil stain looks like the silicone oil bleed from the thermal pad.

 

Interestingly, silicone oil is non-conductive and will not short out electronics.

 

So your problem must be somewhere else.

[Xkillerpn]

Thats oil, will never do a short. SImple as that.

 

Problem is somewere else

[Melona]

I feel I must say with all do respect, that the amount of oil from the pads was significant a.k. very wet. I do not claim to be a expert on this subject but have spent some time reading up and came across many articles and peer reviewed sighted studies that state issues can occur such as solider decoupling ,electrical contact failure and/or some minor conductivity happening, which can cause issues for highly sensitive electronics. I respect that I can't be sure if any of these problems caused my issue but it seems that a well working part that has run flawlessly for many years to suddenly kick the bucket while under no real load is cause for concern. The Accelero was on my card for 3 months. The factory thermal pads didnt seem to have such leaking issues after years of use. If I where to use this cooling solution again I personally would avoid the VRM cooling back plate with its super leak prone thermal pads.

 

"Some problems have been encountered with elastomeric thermal silicone conductive pads. Elastomeric thermal silicone conductive pads would bleed oils which can cause contamination of device surfaces. These oils can then adhere to other substances in the surrounding area which would affect the conductivity of the devices and may cause many other serious problems [ 35]."

 

Arctic still has not even given me so much as a auto reply, the promise "We at ARCTIC will do our best to keep you satisfied." does not look to bright.

Anyhow I got a new card in and it work just fine with the same cables and same PC components. I can game on!

I bought the Gigabyte 1660 Super Gaming OC 6GB, 3 fan Windforce model. So far I'm very impressed with how quiet it runs. And it plays all my games i have tested well also.

 

 

[Melona]

Ok so The ticket i have with Arctic seems to think the issue is not out of the question for it being the thermal pads. I have sent them the rx 580 for examination and possible replacement I hope they do something cause I spent good money to send them the card and receipt for its purchase. Which at the time was $314.99 and was a good deal then. 

[shaz2sxy]

I've used arctic GPU coolers for two previous cards 

670 FTW

and a 1070TI - the 1070ti had the same as yorus with the back plate.  never had any issues.

[shaz2sxy]

Also how much pressure did you use on the gpu as as the washers are warped!