PSA and Facepalm

[ApplesOfEpicness]

So I bought a gtx 980ti from EVGA awhile ago and repasted it. Being the young and unknowing tinkerer I was, I followed the general rule and added a grain of rice sized drop of paste to the core. Faced with random lines and stuff flashing across the screen sometimes just doing nothing I was a bit concerned, but didn’t bat an eye. Several years later and I think crap, it probably didn’t spread across the die. And I was totally right. It’s being running like that for awhile, and I can’t imagine that’s good for the core. So please, more paste on the GPU is fine. It’s better to have it slop over the edge then not cover like 30 percent of it.

 

[Ashleyyyy]

oh wow.. and you didn't notice a drop in performance? i imagine that it would have thermal throttled if it got hot enough to cause glitches.. 

[Phentos]

The 980TI's core is almost the entire size of the silicon chip you see in the image. With that kind of coverage there would be a lot of hotspots in the GPU while running.

 

The reason why pea sized amounts of paste are okay for CPUs is that the die is usually much smaller and usually a rectangular shape, hence why a line is always better for those. GPU cores can be a lot bigger, so more paste is required.

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

u need to make a cross in the middle for full coverage, works way better specially on gpus , make sure to keep pressure on and dont release it to avoid airbubbles

 

cross should be from middle to about 50% to the corner for gpu  about 30% for cpu

 

gpu need more paste then a cpu

 

i only recommend cross method for gpus, same for cpus if u want that extra bit of transfer but on gpus it makes a huge diff

[ApplesOfEpicness]

30 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

oh wow.. and you didn't notice a drop in performance? i imagine that it would have thermal throttled if it got hot enough to cause glitches.. 

Surprisingly, it was just fine and other than the random lines I mentioned,  didn’t see any evidence. If that’s the case, I can’t imagine how hot those spots got because the core boosted normally.

[Ashleyyyy]

1 minute ago, ApplesOfEpicness said:

Surprisingly, it was just fine and other than the random lines I mentioned,  didn’t see any evidence. If that’s the case, I can’t imagine how hot those spots got because the core boosted normally.

hmm maybe it monitored the temp in a spot that was properly cooled.. weird. 

[ApplesOfEpicness]

4 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

hmm maybe it monitored the temp in a spot that was properly cooled.. weird. 

Probably. But that also freaks me out because the uncooled spots were also running that fast. I hope I haven’t done too much irreparable damage ?

 

Its a really nice chip.