Replacing the Thermal Compound on GTX 780 (MSI and Zotac)

Gypopotamus · March 2, 2015

Just a quick post for anyone interested in replacing the thermal compound on an MSI Gaming GTX 780 or a Zotac GTX 780.

I completely forgot to take any pictures, but Linus uploaded a video a few weeks back showing how to do it on a different card, and for these two 780s it was exactly the same method. Remove the 4 screws around the GPU, lift the cooler off, unplug the fan, remove the old compound, put your own on and screw it all back together. It was super easy to do and took me about 15 minutes in total.

One thing to remember is to not put too much compound on your GPU. I accidently put too much on my Zotac card, and ended up with slowly rising temperatures seemingly ad-infinitum, so if you see the same thing after doing yours, try putting slightly less on.

The results after testing in Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity are absolutely brilliant. The Zotac card has, as expected, improved by about 4-6 degrees C under load, and idle temps have stayed the same.

The MSI card, however has seen a massive improvement. I was noticing very high temperatures recently on this card (thermal throttling at either 80 or 90 degrees depending on the limit I set), which is why I decided to replace the thermal compound. Load temperatures are now down to around 74 degrees C under load, and there is no thermal throttling, and idle temperatures have gone down about the same amount, from 40 to 25-30 degrees C!

When I took the MSI card apart to replace the compound, I saw that it had either been poorly applied, or it had eroded over time, as there was barely any thermal compound left on the GPU, and it didn't cover the whole GPU at all. I have had the card for over a year, and have been running it at stock clocks, so this must be a fault on MSI's part. I recommend doing this if you also have higher load temps on a card you've had for a while as it has massively improved my temperatures for my whole system as well as my GPUs.

My rig:

Fractal Design Define R4
2500k @4.5ghz
Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU Cooler

2x SLI GTX 780 (MSI and Zotac) @ Stock

16gb 1600mhz Corsair Vengeance RAM

Fans: 2x140mm in front of case, 1x 140mm in back (Top and side panels closed as default)

Tetters · March 2, 2015

Thanks for the information. We would like to think that the manufacturers put the correct amount of compound on their products thus giving the client the best possible performance etc. This seems to be less of quality control issue than it should be. Compound that degrades over time isn't something that is on many peoples radars (me included) but we should be looking for indications temps are rising and then clean and replace.

This issue seems to be replicated by the CPU manufacturers too, I've read too many stories here about dramatic temp changes when people delidded and replaced the compound, or kept the lid off.