No heatsinks on these GPU components : risky ?

[NightZ]

Hey !

I've recently bought a NZXT G12 with a Kraken X53 on my PNY GTX 1070 Ti and I've placed some heatsinks on the components which were in front of thermal pads on the original cooler as you can see :

Results are amazing : 48 degrees on full load after 2 hours ! (83 degrees before)

 

But I'm a bit worried, there are 4 components which aren't covered by heatsinkS : 

I touched the heatsink surrounded by red circles and it seems pretty hot (in full load). So my question is : is it risky to let these components (btw what components are they?) without heatskins ?

 

Thx!

[Pandur]

Electrical components can be designed with working temperatures of (way) over 100C, you will burn your fingers if you touch components that are in the 50-60C range iirc. So a component does not have to be cold enough for you to touch it to work properly. You are literally not meant to be able to touch every component on a correctly working video card, and other electronics.

 

Covering your entire video card in heatsinks is a waste of time and heatsinks. Stick to where it came with them at stock. And make sure there are sufficient air flow over those areas. From what I can tell those red areas were not connected to the stock cooler with a tim.

 

Unless you plan to do some extreme oc.

[NightZ]

5 minutes ago, Pandur said:

Electrical components can be designed with working temperatures of (way) over 100C, you will burn your fingers if you touch components that are in the 50-60C range iirc. So a component does not have to be cold enough for you to touch it to work properly. You are literally not meant to be able to touch every component on a correctly working video card, and other electronics.

 

Covering your entire video card in heatsinks is a waste of time and heatsinks. Stick to where it came with them at stock. And make sure there are sufficient air flow over those areas. From what I can tell those red areas were not connected to the stock cooler with a tim.

 

Unless you plan to do some extreme oc.

What a clear explanation, thank you ! Can I let heatsinks on the component which weren't covered by thermal pads ? (No risk to overheat them ?)

[Alvin853]

The components you circled are tantalum capacitors, which don't heat up by themselves, they're most likely just hot because of surrounding components getting hot. And they're not sensitive to heat at all, they have standard operating temperatures up to 125°C. It's mostly ICs that need active cooling, so as long as you have heatsinks on all RAM modules and all MOSFETs you should be good. Heatsinks on chokes are a bonus, but not strictly required, I think that's just an efficiency thing, them being less hot puts less stress on the VRMs.

[Pandur]

19 minutes ago, NightZ said:

What a clear explanation, thank you ! Can I let heatsinks on the component which weren't covered by thermal pads ? (No risk to overheat them ?)

Just make sure you haven't shorted out anything with the added heatsinks and you should be fine. And there should not be any reason to continue down this rabbit hole though.

 

Properly mounted heatsinks should almost never cause overheating. But they are also not necessary on every component, some even prefer to be hot to work optimally.

[Alex Atkin UK]

29 minutes ago, Alvin853 said:

Heatsinks on chokes are a bonus, but not strictly required, I think that's just an efficiency thing, them being less hot puts less stress on the VRMs.

I'm not convinced it makes any difference on chokes at all, unless they are resin filled so making some contact to the outer shell.  They are effectively just a coil of wire inside so you can't really extract heat from that as normally there would be an air gap.  Like you said though, it wont hurt anything.

 

The only thing that bothers me here is ideally you want the fins all facing the same direction, a direction where the case airflow is going down the length of the fins so its actually cooling them.  Especially as the ones facing the wrong way might block airflow to the RAM.  I personally would have preferred the spikey ones where it doesn't matter which direction the airflow is going.

[Guest]

You don't need any little heat sinks. Just put a fan on the card. 

[NightZ]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

The only thing that bothers me here is ideally you want the fins all facing the same direction, a direction where the case airflow is going down the length of the fins so its actually cooling them.  Especially as the ones facing the wrong way might block airflow to the RAM.  I personally would have preferred the spikey ones where it doesn't matter which direction the airflow is going.

Yes I know it's not perfect but I couldn't do otherwise...

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'm not convinced it makes any difference on chokes at all, unless they are resin filled so making some contact to the outer shell.  They are effectively just a coil of wire inside so you can't really extract heat from that as normally there would be an air gap.  Like you said though, it wont hurt anything.

 Can you show me where are the chokes ?

2 hours ago, Alvin853 said:

It's mostly ICs that need active cooling, so as long as you have heatsinks on all RAM modules and all MOSFETs you should be good. Heatsinks on chokes are a bonus, but not strictly required, I think that's just an efficiency thing, them being less hot puts less stress on the VRMs.

What are ICs ? 

 

Thank you for your replies guys !

[Alvin853]

8 minutes ago, NightZ said:

What are ICs ? 

Integrated Circuits, also called microchips. I don't know if single MOSFETs technically count as ICs, but anyhing based on silicon/semiconductors. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Chokes/inductors are the big square blocks much larger than the heatsinks.

They do not really generate heat, they're there to limit (choke) the maximum current.

[Ralfi]

5 hours ago, NightZ said:

Results are amazing : 48 degrees on full load after 2 hours ! (83 degrees before)

That’s some drop in temps! Were they measured in the same conditions, with ambient temps taken into account?

[NightZ]

8 hours ago, Ralfi said:

That’s some drop in temps! Were they measured in the same conditions, with ambient temps taken into account?

Yes, exactly the same!