Thermal Paste on GPU...

[Gary7]

My R9 270x has the GPU die surrounded by a green area with lots of little silver dots on it. When i took off the cooler both these areas had thermal paste on them.

I cleaned this off and only put thermal paste on the die itself and not on the area surrounding it. Is this the correct way to do it or should i have made sure the whole area was covered??

 

Heres a picture of what I mean. Am i only supposed to put thermal paste on the silver part?

 

 

[Samppa221]

To the shiny part the middle square.

[vetali]

I've tried adding thermal paste to the outer part a long time ago. No temp diff and it just makes a big mess. 

[Jlryan]

Just a small pea sized blob of Thermal Paste in the middle of the silicon is all you need.

 

The little dots around on the green PCB are Capacitors, and do not need any thermal material on them. If you accidentally use electrically conductive thermal paste and smother the whole area with it, you would likely see big problems.

[Senzelian]

Just a small pea sized blob of Thermal Paste in the middle of the silicon is all you need.

 

The little dots around on the green PCB are Capacitors, and do not need any thermal material on them. If you accidentally use electrically conductive thermal paste and smother the whole area with it, you would likely see big problems.

Does conductive thermal paste even exist?

[Gary7]

Thanks guys. temps are running like 65-70 in wow but near 80 in path of exile which is really weird considering its only using like 500mb VRAM and wow is using 1600.

Both games run 90%+ GPU usage

[Jlryan]

Does conductive thermal paste even exist?

Well sort of, A lot of pastes use metal in the paste to help heat transfer, it's more of a capacitance than conduction, though there is a slim chance a short could occur. Better to be safe then sorry.

 

The Coollaboratory stuff is definitely conductive though. It's basically liquid metal.

[PhantomTates]

Just a small pea sized blob of Thermal Paste in the middle of the silicon is all you need.

I heard the cross is safer. The dot is handy with a heat spreader but this is a die and if you miss a spot, you're boned.

[Jlryan]

I heard the cross is safer. The dot is handy with a heat spreader but this is a die and if you miss a spot, you're boned.

If you somehow manage to miss a spot on the die, then either you're using too little amount of TIM or your heatsink isn't flat.

 

That being said though, on the bigger GPU's I use the cross method with very small blobs in each "section", I just recently did this with my GTX 780, and that has a whoppingly huge die.

[PhantomTates]

If you somehow manage to miss a spot on the die, then either you're using too little amount of TIM or your heatsink isn't flat.

Or you don't tighten the heat sink properly. Which is almost impossible.

[Gary7]

Think I might re-apply tomorrow. Unless people say 70-75 degrees is acceptable on a non-reference cooler. Its a HIS R9 270X

[Jlryan]

Those temps are fine, no need to mess around with it any further.

[PhantomTates]

Unless you have an open air case, those are the temps that I would expect for that card. If it's under 85 degrees, it should be fine.